After having seen my screen real-estate eaten up a bit by these little download tags, I'm trying to figure out the problem that this is solving.

When I wanted the entire code for a node, I simply hit that big download button.

When I wanted just a snippet, I must be the most talented web user on the planet, because it's trivial for me to just (a) highlight a section of the text on my screen, (b) select "copy", (c) go to my text editor, and (d) press "paste".

Now, even though I had an easy method to get the whole doc and get any portion of the doc, I now have sometimes upwards of 4 or 5 more lines of screen real-estate taken up, for no apparent reason, because it's actually harder to have it pop up a new window or screen and go find that, just again to do the cut-n-paste there instead.

So, again, what problem is this solving for people? Can we get these things turned off on a per-user basis? Or even better, can we get these things turned off for everyone until this is somehow explained as being better for everyone overall?

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update: Thanks for pointing out that there is a per-user setting to disable tags. I will disagree that it should have been set off by default. When you make sweeping changes, you should have them be opt-in, not opt-out.

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