Thread

do you typically set all of your custom field formatting to “none” instead of “xhtml”?

Just curious. I usually set the body custom field on my weblog entries to “xhtml” but I’m thinking of going strictly “none” in my next redesign. Seems like it would present less problems and I would have complete control. I’ve just noticed a bit of quirkiness with “xhtml” formatting when using lists along with a few other small things.

When the site is just for yourself, what’s your preference?

On my own site I use all sorts of different formatting.  It depends on the field’s use. I, personally, would not want a real content field to be none, have to type your own HTML then and it’s set in the entry, rather than processed via the template parser.  If you want to go back later and change the formatting you’d have to edit out all of your HTML.

Yeah, true.

I’m kinda running into that now. For whatever reason when I developed my blog, the <h2> tags in the article, I gave them a class of “heading” so now, when I develop the new blog, I’ll have to create a class of “heading” and give to those or go back and change them all to simply reflect an <h2>. Can’t remember why I game them a class. Must have been some great reason. 😉

Do you ever run into problems with unordered and ordered lists when formatting with “xhtml.” I’m sure you’re aware that I’ve had my fair share of problems with them. I just put lists in my posts frequently and it seems that it never fails, a problem comes up. Example being I just noticed that my homepage didn’t validate and one reason is because I’ve got an unordered list in the body field and the outputted source has that unordered list wrapped in a tag, which can’t happen. This is all because of the xhtml formatting I suppose. Little stuff like that bugs me and makes me want to change to “none” formatting, but what you’ve outlined makes me reconsider. It just seems like a lot of times, I end up changing to “none” anyway or almost having so much manual formatting that I might as well go to “none” as it wouldn’t be much different…

Not really, but I use Markdown for all my content areas, so Markdown handles the list-making.  I don’t really use complicated lists, but if you need one, you can always turn off the formatting for that one post.

I’m not familiar with Markdown… what does it do?

Yeah, the lists is just weird to me. Example being on the homepage, where it’s just a simple unordered list with no complicated nesting or anything and the xhtml formatting wrapped the ul in tags, which doesn’t disturb how it looks, but it throws off the validation.

Deron, you’ve had a lot of list issues. If you’re doing a very simple list and still having issues, you may want to try another technical support post.  Reference your previous issues, if you don’t mind.

Markdown.  Others use Textile and like it too. With this one can just do something like:

* list item 1
* list item 2

1. item 1
2. item 2

and get proper lists. 

In any case, if you put your HTML into each entry then you won’t have the benefit of separation.  Letting ExpressionEngine handle it makes the data more easier to manage if you change your mind down the line.  Plus, it makes it so much easier to enter now - if I had to format all my articles, I don’t think I’d ever post.

Also, if the field is set for XHTML parsing, do not allow for spaces in your list items, same with tables.  Simple have the list look like

<ul><li>item 1</li><li>Item 2</li><li>Item 3</li></ul>

  I find that’s easier than turning XHTML off for the body.

Deron, you’ve had a lot of list issues. If you’re doing a very simple list and still having issues, you may want to try another technical support post.  Reference your previous issues, if you don’t mind.

Markdown.  Others use Textile and like it too. With this one can just do something like:

* list item 1
* list item 2

1. item 1
2. item 2

and get proper lists. 

In any case, if you put your HTML into each entry then you won’t have the benefit of separation.  Letting ExpressionEngine handle it makes the data more easier to manage if you change your mind down the line.  Plus, it makes it so much easier to enter now - if I had to format all my articles, I don’t think I’d ever post.

Yeah, you’re definitely right! I’ve had my share of issues with lists over the last year. 😊 It’s not a huge deal right now. I’ll leave it until I change the design. It’s probably just the way I’m using the lists inside of an xhtml formatted field. See below…

I think I’ll give Markdown a look see and see if it makes any sense to me. I’ve looked at Textile before and honestly, it makes no sense to me at all.

You’re right though, simply going through and using * for your list items would be much easier than the way I have been doing it. Going forward, if I use that method, I’ll need to go back and redo everything I’ve done since my blog started, but I think that would make everything easier going forward. How do you typically create heading tags in your posts? Simply write out <h2> or is there Markdown code for that as well?

Also, if the field is set for XHTML parsing, do not allow for spaces in your list items, same with tables.  Simple have the list look like

<ul><li>item 1</li><li>Item 2</li><li>Item 3</li></ul>

  I find that’s easier than turning XHTML off for the body.

Ah, I didn’t know that. See, when I have a list inside of a post, I format it just like you normally would:

<ul>
<li>list item</li>
<li>list item</li>
</ul>

And it ends up placing
tags after each <ul> and <li> in the list as well as some other things like the tags I mentioned earlier.

Actually, I read a little bit in the documentation of Markdown and see that one way to do headers is #Header, but I still don’t see anything if I would need to add a class or id on the header item or list items? Maybe that’s not possible and at that point would require to hard code the class name with html…

And it ends up placing
tags after each <ul> and <li> in the list as well as some other things like the tags I mentioned earlier.

Yeah spacing is very important to the XHTML format tag. But I think the easiest way to acknowledge it is that, XHTML format handles all returns, single or double. A single return equals a break (< br >) or double return equals a < p> tag.  So if you don’t want one or the other, don’t provide the space marks.  I typically format as usual, cause its easier to read, then remove the spaces, with a script or find & replace in BBEdit or something.

Did some more research and playing around with Textile, I actually like it better than Markdown I think after finally seeing how it works! I’m gonna have to change my blog over pronto! This will save so much time it will be crazy.

With Textile or Markdown installed, I assume the body field in which it’s being used need to have “xhtml” formatting to work?

No, you edit your custom field to allow Markdown to be available to it, or set it as the default.

I see. Thanks a bunch for enlightening me to this. 😊

Actually, thought of another question here.

For a custom field in which I plan to use “textile” formatting. I assume that I will have to use textile 100%. What I mean by that is now, with xhtml formatting, if I want a new paragraph, I just start typing, hit enter twice and start typing again and xhtml formatting does the rest. With textile formatting, I assume I’ll need to add “p.” before each paragraph, correct? Or will leaving text paragraphs without any formatting still render tags?

Nope, you can still just hit enter twice.