The Commentator

Disclaimer

Please do not email me about this project without reading the disclaimer above.

• A site may use its own proprietary markup and a JavaScript editor to create it.
• A site may refuse to let you use any markup of any kind, just vanilla ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) or Unicode text
• A site may let you use a restricted subset of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language).
• A site may let you use only unaccented characters, it may allow some accented characters, or some entities.
• A site may restrict you to so many words or characters.
• A site may have rules on what sorts of URL (Uniform Resource Locator) link are acceptable.
• A site may have forbidden words.
• A site or browser may have defective proprietary text editor.

The intent of The Commentator is to take some ordinary HTML and massage it into a form to placate a given news site and if simple copy/paste does not work to insert the message into the submit box, help you upload it.

Some of the things it might do include:

• Strip out or convert unsupported HTML markup. E.g. <li> could be represented as · or (o) or * or 1. or 1). <bold> could be represented as _xxx_
• Write a little length-pruning editor that shows you how close to the limit with a marker of some kind. Text does not disappear when you temporarily delete it, just changes font, colour, background, box etc. You can, with a sweep of a mouse, restore previously deleted text.
• Let you prepare text in multiple formats for posting at different newspaper sites around the world.
• Prepare URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in the preferred for delete them for sites that don’t let you create links.
• Some sites, like Richard Dawkins allow you to refer to URLs unless they point to your own site. It could automatically remove such links.
• I post most often on Facebook, IMDb, CBC news, HTMLValidator, JPSoft, Opera, OpposinigViews. Each system has its own rules of what it will accept and how you encode bold, accents, entities, list items, colours etc.
• Warn you of words or phrases you used that a particular site finds offensive, perhaps replacing them with suitable euphemisms.
• Do a spell check as you go.
• Do grammar checkingr, e.g. consistency of voice, plural agreement, trite phrases.
• Design this as a plug-in so other people can code up classes to handle other sites using your basic tool set of methods.

With the Commentator, you can compose with your familiar tools. The editors on websites are usually grossly incompetent and love to throw away all your work at the slightest excuse, or discard it randomly. With The Commentator you can’t lose your work and you have a permanent local copy perhaps to post again somewhere else later.

This is one of those projects that can start out with only a handful of features implemented and still be useful.

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