Make ins and del not suck
Lach reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to think about:
However, there is one problem with <ins>. I haven’t checked it in other browsers, but in Mozilla text inside it is underlined. Not only is it ugly, but it also clashes with proper links. The situation with <del> is simple — it displays with a line-through by default and that’s a really good way to display it anyway.
I agree completely that displaying <ins> underlined is a bad idea: in the context of the web, not only does it imply a link, but it’s so rarely seen that even once someone realizes that it isn’t a link they aren’t likely to think “oh, it must be inserted text that he added later.” However, I’m not so convinced that the linethrough display of <del> is a good thing, either. For a single word, especially one with a capital letter and some ascenders and descenders, so that it’s partially recognized by shape alone, it’s not too bad, but when you want people to be able to still read several words (or worse yet lines), linethrough is pretty evil looking. What I’d really like is to be able to control the text-decoration color separately from the text color, so that I could have the text a bit lighter than normal, with the linethrough quite a bit lighter (or, in better keeping with my lazy reality, have browsers do it automatically for me).
Half-way through this one and I was ready to post a big Whaaaaa? – until I realized you weren’t discussing computer keyboards. Color me up too early for blog comprehension. And then strike it.
Oh, making that Ins not suck is easy: tear it off your keyboard. I had to look to be sure, but nope, my laptop keyboard doesn’t have one. That would be the first time I’ve looked, in 14 months. I’m sure that for the 0.0001% of the population that uses it, it’s absolutely vital, but I can’t really remember the last time I hit it intentionally, except as a control key.
I think this is an area where Mozilla definitely has it better than IE. A line-througth makes it harder to read text, but the text is still readable, whereas Internet Explorer’s big fat lines obscure far too much of the underneath text.
Being able to pick text-decoration colours sounds good, though.
The overstrike for DEL and underline for INS seems consistent with revision marks used in MS Word, and perhaps other word processors as well. They even go so far as to change the color, but that might further confuse things with hyperlinks.
What I’d like to see is a toggle to display or hide DEL-marked text in the browser, and perhaps even a way to go backwards and forwards in time to view a document’s various stages of revision.