XKCD: It's more than a comic

It's like an inverse of The Hitchhiker's Guide gin and tonic joke.

It’s pretty clearly making fun of the soda vs pop maps.

In Texas, we call everything "Coke". Doesn't matter if it's Pepsi, Dr. Pepper or even 7-Up. If it's carbonated but not a beer, it's "Coke".

Dr Pepper is so popular in central Texas (originated in the area), I joke that they call all sodas "Dr Pepper".

I've been in Illinois for my entire life and I very rarely hear soda referred to as "pop."

I grew up in Indiana and everyone called it either "pop", "coke", or by the specific brand name or flavor.

At some point, I decided "pop" sounds childish and chose to default to "soda".

In Toronto, everyone I've met tends towards "pop". I called it soda for a while personally, I'm not sure why, but now I'm back to pop.

...Pretty much everyone I know everywhere I've lived refers to carbonated drinks by the brand name. I don't think I've had or heard the soda/pop argument since I was like six.

Edited by Arha on Feb 6th 2019 at 11:40:27 AM

Is the "How To" ad huge for anyone else too? It takes up over half the page for me. That's a bit excessive, especially for a book that won't be for sale for another seven months.

It's fine for me with both desktop and mobile.

In french, we call it liquor. No, there is no alcohol in our Coke or Pepsi.

Uh, not in France I've never heard that. Where do you live?

Looking at the book announcement page again, I can't help but chuckle when looking at the world map.

Invisible Formatting. I've felt that way sometimes too. XD ^_^;;

Oh, lord. This is so annoying sometimes.

Quebec province.

The undo button exists for a reason.

Except sometimes you change your mind on formatting hours or even weeks later.

I tend to select the whole paragraph, bold it all, and then (without unselecting it) unbold it. And if that doesn't work, "clear formatting" always works; you just have to add back the formatting you actually wanted.

Sometimes I receive documents written by someone else that I have to go in and change or edit, and I hate it when this happens.

Why are you able to bold a space in the first place? Applying any formatting to a space should be a no-no. And if it does need to be adapted, tie it to the surrounding text formatting instead.

Another solution is to always select words by double clicking them, not manually. That way you can be sure you don't leave invisible markups.

No, see, that's the problem, because double clicking can be inconsistent. Sometimes it selects the space after, sometimes it doesn't. Or maybe you want to bold multiple words in a row and then decide to unbold one word, so on and so on.

Formatting isn't applied to individual characters, there are invisible tags that say "bold begins here" and "bold ends here". And there's no reason why "bold ends here" can't be just after a space.

Now that's the reason to use markup languages (such as Markdown, or the one you use in this wiki) instead of WYSIWYG editors. Or if you want to get the good from both worlds, edit the text in markup, and have a preview rendered real-time. Stack Overflow and its brother sites do this. And of course, you should have a more friendly UI than we have here. For example, selecting a text and clicking on bold adds the necessary markup. Again, the above mentioned sites do this too.

Are you seriously suggesting people write their essays and books and whatnot in markup language?

Edited by Redmess on Feb 9th 2019 at 12:11:14 PM

The editors would definitely like it.

Edit: Also, if you are writing, say, a novel, that's 99% text. The most used formatting is the new paragraph, which is two newlines (in pretty much any markup language that's more lightweight than HTML). That's easy to remember, and also easy to read even in text form.

Edited by petersohn on Feb 9th 2019 at 12:21:57 PM