Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Re: OpenACS Permissions System - Performance Improvement Work

Don, pre-formatted wide text most certainly should not be wrapped on display. That is the whole point of what "pre-formatted" or "fixed width" text means - display it exactly as I give it to you, line breaks and all. The point is that super wide pre-formatted text must not affect the display of other posts in the same thread. Right now it does, and this is a bug.

In fact any one post, regardless of whether a particular post is well or poorly formatted, must never break the display or formatting of all the other posts in a thread.

IMO this is an important correctness and usability criteria, the sort of thing that OpenACS is usually good about getting right, and much more important than getting the particular background color or whatever that someone prefers. But people making look and feel changes to OpenACS appear to sometimes completely ignore all such UI correctness concerns, and repeatedly re-introduce this bug. I'd say that's rather embarassing to the project.

If a user mis-formats a post, it would be very nice to have any easy way for a Forums admin (or better yet, any one of many trusted and designated "power users" or "sub-admins" in the community) to fix that one post. But that's a separate issue.