Please, no POD. I do *not* want to try deal with significant whitespace in a feature-impoverished browser textarea, and if you think getting newbies to use code tags and whatnot is hard with an HTML-like markup, just you think about trying to convince newbies who want help with PERL that they should post their question with POD markup. Gah. Gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it.
An
option to post in POD doesn't mean a requirement
to do so. If Perlmonks were to allow posts in POD and/or plain
text, I'd imagine a drop down box, or a radio button next to
the textarea to flag the format of the posting. Defaults could come from a user preference, or from the users last
post. I'd also imagine a heuristic that classifies the
posting with a great degree of accurancy, and relative
simple ways for the poster to force a markup style if the
guesser guesses wrong. (Say, a post starting with
<html> is in HTML, a post starting with
=\w+ is in POD, regardless how the rest of the
post looks like).
As for the significant whitespace thing, whitespace inside
<code> is currently significant. Quite
significant actually.
Abigail
