Moderator post: Please avoid excessive text formatting

[ron_newman]

I've seen a few complaints about this lately, so I'd like to propose a new rule:

Please keep text formatting to an essential minimum when posting to davis_square. In particular, please try not to do not:

- specify an explicit <font> face, size, or color, especially at the outermost (top) level of your post
- paste formatted text into the Rich Text editor from Microsoft Word or another word processor

Doing these things often makes your post less readable on other people's friends pages, or results in text that looks too big or too small on some screens. In at least one case, I recall it generating huge numbers of blank lines at the end of a post, because of a <span> or <div> tag that got pasted in from Microsoft Word.

Thanks for your cooperation. After some discussion here, I'll probably add this to the rules on the community's profile page.

Comments

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

Hmm, it looks like maybe 8-point text to me, nothing out of the ordinary.

[diatomacearth.livejournal.com]

Basically, your browser is reading that tag differently than ron_newman's. Some kinds of tags are very flexible, and standard web language--all browsers can read them, and the browsers interpret those tags in a way that accounts for the user's preferences. Some are very specific, and so they show up differently on browsers with different settings. This is not so good, because what looks fine to the creator of a text may be an illegible mess on a browser they don't use, and they won't realize.