Monday, June 06, 2011

Blogger versus Facebook Text Editors

I've been using the Facebook feature that allows import of a blog into Notes. (See the first entry at the link.) Unfortunately, the feed doesn't seem to be updating in Facebook, while it does update elsewhere. So recently I've taken to manually importing on a post by post basis. Having done this a bit, here are some observations.

1. Since my posts are not simply un-styled text, but have links, embedded images, and some formatting, I've taken to copy the html version that Blogger produces and paste that into the Facebook editor.

2. Some of the html commands come through fine. For example, (blockquote)quoted text(/blockquote)*. Blogger renders the quoted text by indenting. Facebook renders it by putting a vertical bar to the left. But the idea of a block quote does translate.

3. Other html commands that Blogger utilizes Facebook doesn't recognize. For me, the biggest of these is (div)paragraph formatting(/div). The div tag can then have a bunch of different attributes such as alignment, font style, font color, other text formatting. Facebook doesn't do any of that.

4. Facebook seems to like old html, the type I first learned. For example, (b)bolded text(/b) and (u)underlined text(/u). So if I want to keep the formatting then I need to redo in Facebook.

I find this mildly disturbing. I get that Facebook wants to be really simple in its editing, but if it can bring in an RSS feed and the feed has the formatting, it should allow its Notes editor to produce the formatting as well.

*I am using parenthesis () rather than the less than sign and the greater than sign <> to display the html so readers can see the tags. Otherwise, Blogger will render it.

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