Please stop using the <br> tag instead of <p>

Agreed.
This should be fixed in 1.4 when released.

No way. I completely disagree. It'll completely mess up my posts. I use PFF to write/ create over 100+ pieces per week, and I do modifications in the blog platforms I use (mostly wordpress, blogger, typepad, movable type). If you replace the <br/> with <p>, I'll have to spend hours each week getting rid of the damn <p> tags. Or I'll have to switch to another editor, which I don't want to do. Please don't do this.

The other HTML editors are completely wrong. If you want <p> tags, you should have to specify that explicitly. For platforms like Typepad and Blogger, they do the conversion automatically. Don't change things, Jed. Or offer a configuration. Or a power user version? (I don't have time to write up my own addons.) I've already had to adjust to a couple of annoying changes since the first version, but this will really bugger me up.

Raj, I hear you, thanks for speaking up, glad to know this could mess current users up.

I'm not sure I agree though. I'm pretty sure every html editor and blog editor for that matter uses < p >'s instead of breaks for paragraphs.

No matter what happens, I will make sure you can revert it back to how it has been.

two questions for you
1) Could PM me your email address, so when any changes like this do happen, I would love your feedback on some preview builds

2) What annoying changes have happened since the first pff builds?

Thanks!

This won't completely mess me up, but I do prefer it as it is. I can understand the need by others for a standard. I'm almost on the fence with this one, but leaning towards Raj's points.

Thanks for the feedback.
What about the "Source view"?
Right now linebreaks are treated as br's when in live mode and publishing, but are stripped when you are viewing it in source mode.

I actually hate it, as I think source should be pure source no filtering. Would that affect you guys as well?

Jed, pure HTML source code please! No filtering!

And if you show ALL tags please make sure that automagically no CRs are in the copied text or apply a button 'copy compressed HTML' which puts all HTML on one line.

And YES, I want p-tags (also because of CSS reasons).

PS: And start using strong-tags please.

Full source code is better in my book too.

Markus makes a great point about p-tags for CSS reasons, I think I'm leaning towards that camp now.

I raised the point since I find editing old posts using the wordpress online editor (and blogger I believe) a little arduous alongside Performancing - it inserts [p] tags on a linebreak, so you can easily end up with a mishmash of paragraph styles.

Strong and em would both be good from the CSS aspect too.

Aye for full source. I often go into PFF source tabe to do work, then flip to "rich", then back to source, only to find my partial HTML stripped out. Arggh.

Then again, notice that most people commenting here are power users. Not everyone is going to want these features. But because of my background, I like mucking about in code and don't like it interpreted for me the way Microsoft's editors tend to do.

Funny, I just realized Markus is asking for p-tags for CSS reasons. I would think that for that very reason, you wouldn't want p-tags. Care to explain?

As for b over strong, etc., PFF already changed once and I had to adjust. The problem is that I use several different platforms. On some I need b, on others strong. Same for i and em. Don't know if you can implement on the fly conversion, but what I have had to do is copy and paste into a raw text editor with search and replace.

Oh yeah; I haven't read the manual, but I certainly cannot see how the "Search" field in PFF works. It doen't work for the post/blog list and it doesn't work for the editor pane.

Sorry for the multiple comments. Personally, I typed extremely fast out of necessity for the number of posts I write weekly. My fingers are used to the "natural" behaviour of striking the "enter" key and getting a line break. If I had to do ctrl-enter instead, it would slow me down considerably. But I see the other bloggers' point for their needs. Is a compromise possible? Say configurable behaviour?

@Raj [p] tags can be formatted differently to [br] tags in your CSS. In mine, for example, it creates extra space between paragraphs, whereas [br] just starts a new line. If I use performancing, paragraphs are not laid out the way I wanted them - with spaces.

@Markus Not so sure about stripping [CR]s, why not add one when there's break or new para? Makes the code a lot more legible if you want to edit it prior to/or after publishing.

Right. The problem with b vs strong (html vs xhtml) is that the inline editor in Firefox only supports b (thanks to stupid ie mimicing).

What I can do though is add an option (maybe in context menu) for converting your post to xhtml and visa-versa. Even possibly do this as a pref on the fly when you press 'publish'. I personally wouldn't use that and would want to do it manually via a "convert to xhtml" option.

@Raj: What do you mean the 'search' field? It's only in the 'notes' tab and will search for a string in all of your notes and show what notes contain it.

It's getting complicated ...

To me source code means source code and not interpreted toast That's the reason why I want to see all the code. But jandelaney is right when it comes to usability.

How do I solve it?
Well, copying source code from PFF to all off my blogs converts double line breaks to p-tags :-)

Still I want and need strong-tags. Why? Arghh, p.com doesn't accept the bold-spans :-)

@iandelaney: Yeah, but at 100+ posts per week, I don't have time go monkeying about with CSS when I shouldn't have to. I also write stuff for clients who do not want

tags.

@jed: Interesting. I have the exact same Firefox and PFF versions on my laptop and desktop computers. The search feature has never worked on my laptop since the very first version of PFF. I just tried on my desktop and it works like a charm. No idea what the heck is going on.

spans: That's another things. Has b/ strong been obsoleted? Because having span-bold tags is yet another unnecessary move. Code has to be lean, and a "b" is one character. Strong and span-bold take up way too much space unnecessarily. (Sorry Markus, I don't agree.)

@Raj: It's totally OK ... we are on two different publishing lanes (it seems to me).

BTW, to make it more complicated: I am using PFF every day to collect data from web pages and do the first editing. I am seldomly using KompoZer (ex NVU) for complicated designs and or forms. And I am using OpenOffice Writer (!) for clean hand written code. Last not least c't ac'tivAID (realized with AutoHotKey) is a great tool for a lot of things in all applications.

OpenOffice Writer is great for clean typography, great spell checking and a super thesaurus. It simply is a very very good program for writing text. But for me the very best thing is that I have all my tags and text snippets as shortcuts. Oh, and all documents are automatically stored and restored after a crash.

Raj, you should have a look at all those combined features :-)

Markus, I'm starting to use OpenOffice more often (well the spreadsheet anyway), but because I do so much info collection from multiple websites simultaneously, my whole purpose for using PFF, in bottom-pane view, is so that I can type my content while reading each webpage. If I had to use anything else other than PFF, I would need 48 hours in each day to finish my work.

I couldn't write as much as I do without PFF. And having no time for anything else these days, I have no need of any wordprocessor, free or otherwise :)

@Raj: I am with you. That's exactly one of the biggest advantages for people who quote a lot and add comments or notes to those snippets.

That's the reason why I would love to have a 'strip text formatting' from pasted text feature in PFF.

@Jed: Even a 'positive list' would help! Give me a list where I can add common formatting tags which should be stripped from pasted text i.e 'class="blabla" '.

Whenever it changed, the use of

in the code has added unwanted breaks to my posts, especially when seen in IE. I don't use IE, but a lot of people still do, and it is making my blog look horrible.

I hope this will solve/fix this bug, and I look forward to the next edition ...

George, I assume this only happens in your Blogger blogs?
I'm looking for a solution now.. sorry about that.

Well... i think that everyone it's looking over their personal benefit.

I mean, let's do it standard.

We could set a preference to publish it to XHtml or to HTML.

I want to keep my web standard, the web should be standard!.

We need to concientize this!.

Hi Everybody :-)

I have been using HTML tags on a particular website for 3 years now without any problem until the last couple of weeks, now everytime i try to edit my page, when i click "save changes" i get a pop up window telling me "PLEASE DO NOT USE HTML TAGS!"

This is so anoying!....i have googled everything on "PLEASE DO NOT USE HTML TAGS!" but no joy - no information on how to bypass this (surely they must be a html script i can use to override the "PLEASE DO NOT USE HTML TAGS!" thing - ANY IDEAS WOULD BE GREATLY APPRECIATED! - THANKS EVERYONE ;-)