"text" editing mode

When writing or editing a post or review on Trailspace, you have a choice of "visual" and "text" editing modes. Do any of you use text mode, or do you stick with the default visual mode?

I have always used Visual mode, whats the text mode do?

I think that I have used both but am not fully sure what the difference between the two is.

The only time I change to "text" mode is when I'm in the forums, and quoting a previous message. Then I use text mode to edit the quoted material to include just the portions relevant to my reply.

The "text mode" is where you can manually enter/edit the HTML code that formats how the message appears on screen in a browser once posted. It is the text plus the HTML Code that is the "instructions" for how it should look and that points to or embeds images and video.

I am quite glad that it is there, because I often post from my Android phone, and even with a full HTML browser, the visual function wont work for some reason. I am sure that is something that will change with time as the android programming and apps get better, but for now the "text" option i the only thing that works.

Gary, D&G: The text mode is a bit of a holdover from days before we had the visual editor. In text mode, you have to type in special formatting code. For example, if you want bold text, you have to type "your text" instead of just clicking the bold button.

Bill: You should be able to edit quotes in visual mode. Is there something that prevents you from doing that? Or do you just prefer the text mode?

Gonzan: It looks like there are some limitations in Android (and iPhone) that prevent them from using the visual editor. I'll see if I can get it to default to text mode for those browsers/devices.

Dave said:

Bill: You should be able to edit quotes in visual mode. Is there something that prevents you from doing that? Or do you just prefer the text mode?

Hmm, OK, it's working now Dave. When I first clicked on the block, it marked it as an "object", not as text... so I guess when I first saw that I stopped trying. This time, however, I tried clicking in different spots until I got it to let me highlight text within the quoted block.

This is with IE9 on Windows 7/64.

bheiser1 said:

Dave said:

This is with IE9 on Windows 7/64.

and now I'm trying it with Firefox 4.0 Beta 6. This works too :).

Glad it's working for you now. Thanks for the feedback and testing.

The reason I started this thread: we're going to be making some changes (probably later today) to the way text mode works.

Specifically, the formatting of tags will change a little bit. Instead of BBCode-style tags (e.g. [ b ]for bold[ /b ]) we'll be using HTML-style tags (e.g. <b>for bold</b>) from here forward. From the sounds of it, this won't affect too many people.

Also, we're completely disabling visual mode for iPhone, Android, and other Mobile Safari-based browsers, where it didn't work anyway. Now you should get text mode by default as the only option on your phone.

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