Editing Talk:1271: Highlighting

I used to think I was crazy, but this webcomic tells me I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with marking your place as your reading, its more or less just something to keep your hands busy while reading an article. It does drive other people crazy. [[User:HardKase|HardKase]] ([[User talk:HardKase|talk]]) 02:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Personally, I dislike it when the highlighted area includes either the beginning indent/tab or the ending indent/tab, so according to my standards, I'm satisfied with the highlighting in paragraphs 1-3, but not with 4-6. <span style="color:green;">Saibot84</span> 04:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:There is nothing marked in paragraph 6, is there? --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 07:07, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::@Chtz, no there's nothing highlighted in paragraph 6, I meant "mark" as the score it was given. And while I'm here, I just noticed Randall corrected the spelling of "highlighted" in the text below the image. Should someone re-upload the image here? <span style="color:green;">Saibot84</span> 13:21, 30 September 2013 (UTC)


Why does he spell highlight like "hilight"? [[Special:Contributions/62.209.198.2|62.209.198.2]] 06:47, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:Good question. Wiktionary allows {{Wiktionary|hilite}} as ''informal'', but says that {{Wiktionary|hilight}} is a "common misspelling". --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 07:07, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::I assumed the poor spelling was a subtle way of poking fun at a site that would do something as stupid as trying to prohibit highlighting. —[[User:Scs|Scs]] ([[User talk:Scs|talk]]) 03:20, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
:It seems the comic has now changed to spelling it "highlight" [[Special:Contributions/87.198.51.178|87.198.51.178]] 21:56, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm so used to doing this that I know a few tricks and tiny strips of areas to click on in order to achieve symmetry in some tricky situations. [[Special:Contributions/131.215.169.224|131.215.169.224]] 07:53, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

: On some pages, I spent more time getting the highlights right than actually reading it --[[Special:Contributions/141.89.226.146|141.89.226.146]] 08:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
: You will all certainly hate Confluence's new editing of code. One micrometer and your h/l is undone {{unsigned ip|145.64.134.242}}

The most frustrating thing when it comes to highlighting: willing to select text on a long line (such as source code with no word wrap) only to have the mouse cursor move out of line, sabotaging your selection and location in the text. When pages are wider than the visible area, it should not jump to the left side when there are empty lines above/below a long line and you drag the selection up/down, instead, it should scroll left only as you drag the selection to the left. [[Special:Contributions/213.163.40.100|213.163.40.100]] 08:11, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:If you have source code extensively above your horizontal screen size, you either have a very small screen or you should rethink your coding style. ;) --[[User:Chtz|Chtz]] ([[User talk:Chtz|talk]]) 08:35, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
:The most frustrating thing for ''me'' is mouse-selection (though thankfully not keyboard-selection) tends in my experience to assume that a mid-selected word means "the start of the word as well", at least in a browser context. Especially in forum conversations, when you get '<nowiki>[quote="oneperson"][quote="ofanotherperson"]Blah[/quote]Replyblah[/quote]</nowiki>' to reply to, and you want to highlight and excise the inner quote, for brevity, it often adjusts to include the "] after the "oneperson".  Which is annoying and breaks your BBCode if you don't notice what you also accidentally deleted, and correct for it.
:Outside of such forum specifics, example 4 looks like a successfully chosen entire DIV-block.  Which is a handy thing to be able to do, sometimes, but as long as you aren't ''forced'' to do so (beyond the "reading guide" purpose for the highlighting, with optional OCD, when it's probably not of concern).  And watch out (as a variant of the title text) that the ''entire'' text block hasn't been A HREFed or similar (popular, these days, seemingly to cater for messy touchscreen tablet navigation, sometimes even without a navigate-to cursor change).  This is why I have a Perl application that will politely scrape regularly-viewed pages, regexp and reformat as necessary and give a better/pre-processed interface to such information.  Which is nice. [[Special:Contributions/178.98.253.80|178.98.253.80]] 16:27, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I do this all the time too... my wife HATES it! --[[User:Jeff|<b><font color="orange">Jeff</font></b>]] ([[User talk:Jeff|talk]]) 12:13, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

I thought I was the only one. Although, I do a variation where I try to get the beginning of the selection directly over the end of the selection so that they vertically align and cause a glide reflection of sorts. [[Special:Contributions/96.254.46.231|96.254.46.231]] 14:06, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

;New file name
The picture hilighting.png should be moved to highlighting.png. BTW: There is still a typo at the ''click...'' statement.--[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 14:56, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

: is that necessary? Imho it should follow the misspelling of the article itself [[Special:Contributions/74.125.183.194|74.125.183.194]] 16:10, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
::It is done by an admin here and necessary because this list [[List_of_all_comics]] did render a wrong image link. Even when the original file name is in fact still "hilighting.png". --[[User:Dgbrt|Dgbrt]] ([[User talk:Dgbrt|talk]]) 19:52, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

;Maybe he fears a trojan?
About Randall panicking about the clicking-a-word-triggers-a-search-script, there are certain trojan-ish programs that tamper with the user's browser and install such a script in them. In that case, various words on any webpage would become clickable links that lead to advertisement and potentially other unsavory things.
I had to clean a family member's computer from one such infection; I'm no expert but sleuthing a bit led me to believe he might've got it from a seemingly innocuous video-to-gif freeware. 
If I saw that word-popping behavior on a webpage again, my immediate thought would probably be that it's from a malignant script and I'd probably drop everything like Randall and start scanning my machine. [[Special:Contributions/67.71.33.122|67.71.33.122]] 16:17, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

;Can't select the text in the image either

Ironically, when text is displayed using an image like in the comic itself, it is also impossible to highlight text.
[[User:Tom0000|Tom0000]] ([[User talk:Tom0000|talk]]) 18:29, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

;Double-Clicking
While ''double''-clicking on a paragraph, chromium gives the patter of (5); firefox, on the other hand, selects text only, meaning no whitespaces (indent or margin) on either side of the text (not shown in comic). Running linux, I didn't try safari or i-ex. (On a last side-note, konqueror doesn't select the paragraph at all, but only the current line...) [[Special:Contributions/134.130.114.148|134.130.114.148]] 09:06, 2 October 2013 (UTC)
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-Did anyone happen to notice that his use of the word "Symmetrical" is not technically correct in this instance? The highlighted areas in those examples are not actually symmetrical. It's more like...congruent halves...
-:It's rotationally symmetrical. <span style="text-shadow:0 0 7px black">[[User:Beanie|<span style="font-size:11pt;color:#dddddd">Beanie</span>]]</span> <sup><span style="text-shadow:0 0 4px #000000">[[User talk:Beanie|<span style="font-size:8pt;color:#dddddd">talk</span>]]</span></sup> 10:58, 7 June 2021 (UTC)
 I used to think I was crazy, but this webcomic tells me I'm not alone. It has nothing to do with marking your place as your reading, its more or less just something to keep your hands busy while reading an article. It does drive other people crazy. [[User:HardKase|HardKase]] ([[User talk:HardKase|talk]]) 02:11, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
-:I first started highlighting while reading stuff online when I should have been working, in order to keep my 'click frequency' from dropping to zero. Quiet mouse = Obviously not working (In the software we use anyway) --[[User:Pudder|Pudder]] ([[User talk:Pudder|talk]]) 15:52, 15 October 2014 (UTC)
 Personally, I dislike it when the highlighted area includes either the beginning indent/tab or the ending indent/tab, so according to my standards, I'm satisfied with the highlighting in paragraphs 1-3, but not with 4-6. <span style="color:green;">Saibot84</span> 04:33, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
@@ Line 15: / Line 10: @@
 ::I assumed the poor spelling was a subtle way of poking fun at a site that would do something as stupid as trying to prohibit highlighting. —[[User:Scs|Scs]] ([[User talk:Scs|talk]]) 03:20, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
 :It seems the comic has now changed to spelling it "highlight" [[Special:Contributions/87.198.51.178|87.198.51.178]] 21:56, 1 October 2013 (UTC)
-::But the name of the png file is still misspelt (I didn't know if the title was also misspelt or not, that's why I came here :D) [[Special:Contributions/108.162.229.53|108.162.229.53]] 15:32, 10 December 2013 (UTC)
 I'm so used to doing this that I know a few tricks and tiny strips of areas to click on in order to achieve symmetry in some tricky situations. [[Special:Contributions/131.215.169.224|131.215.169.224]] 07:53, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
@@ Line 49: / Line 43: @@
 ;Double-Clicking
 While ''double''-clicking on a paragraph, chromium gives the patter of (5); firefox, on the other hand, selects text only, meaning no whitespaces (indent or margin) on either side of the text (not shown in comic). Running linux, I didn't try safari or i-ex. (On a last side-note, konqueror doesn't select the paragraph at all, but only the current line...) [[Special:Contributions/134.130.114.148|134.130.114.148]] 09:06, 2 October 2013 (UTC)
-:In Firefox (in Gnome 3 on Ubuntu, in case this is desktop environment specific or operating system specific), I have to ''triple''-click to select a paragraph. Double-clicking would select a single word. --[[User:Das-g|Das-g]] ([[User talk:Das-g|talk]]) 14:09, 2 October 2013 (UTC)
-::Also in Firefox, you can't select like Randall has selected, as it doesn't select any non-space/tab whitespace.
-::And yes, you have to (or should have to) triple click to select a paragraph.[[User:GBGamer117|GBGamer117 &#62; /dev/null]] ([[User talk:GBGamer117|talk]]) 06:12, 5 October 2013 (UTC)GBGamer117
-:: In chrome: 2 clicks = word, 3 clicks = paragraph.Microsoft word exclusive: Ctrl-A = '''''everything!''''' [[Special:Contributions/108.162.218.65|108.162.218.65]] 19:21, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
-:::CTRL-A is not exclusive to MS Word; as an example, it works in Chrome. (If you're in a text box, it's Select All of the contents of that box, but if you click in a non-form region of the page, it will in fact select everything. [[Special:Contributions/173.245.55.86|173.245.55.86]] 08:21, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
-I am relived to know that I am not the only person compulsive enough to have this issue. Though I particularity like case 3 when the highlight starts at the beginning of a word and ends at the end of one, and does not start or end in the middle of a word. {{unsigned ip|141.101.98.14}}
-=
-I don't know what the Xes are talking about. There's no wrong way to highlight stuff! [[Special:Contributions/172.68.3.59|172.68.3.59]] 16:32, 30 January 2024 (UTC)