If that's addressed to me, Skip, my understanding versus your understanding is not even a factor in my opinion, which I expressed in relation to goodguy's comment, not anything you have said. Please do not assume that i am required to address your concerns, let alone acquiesce to your view.

MY view matches that of goodguy; displaying text formatting in the overview field is unnecessary because of the presence of the cover scans. You can argue all you want but that's what I think. Doesn't mean I don't add 'formatting' marks as the rules require, and doesn't mean that I wouldn't adjust to and accomodate a more complicated system, yet I am still left with that basic human right of opinion, and that is not yours to take away, dispel, and certainly not override.

Do stop equating disagreement with ignorance, Skip. This is not terribly agreeable in and of itself.

See, I have faith in people that they are capable of discerning context, I am under no impression that most people will be confused by something I understand. Again, such a distinction can be made by looking at the scans. There's only so many times we need the same data in the same profile. Putting quotation marks around formatted text simply reduces the chances of a successful text search of the overview. Probably not drastically, but still possibly. Were the system able to ignore them, it would be different, but since they double as valid punctuation marks, it is futile.

You commented that "displaying text formatting would create a mess". Well yes of course it would. It currently does, this is my point. Who has actually called for a html tag-style system that would have the sole option of displaying the tags? Please provide a quotation.

Anyway, long story short. Stop assuming people are ignorant because they prioritise and qualify differently to you. When you make comments such as "appear to me to have blinders on", all this says is "I must be right and since you disagree the only interpretation is that you don't understand," which is of course not true.

Quoting skipnet50:

Quote:
Displaying text formatting would create a mess, nadja.

Nadja didn't ask for text formatting, and neither did I. It seems to me, we are all in perfect agreement here.

Quote:
In one of those instances Magnum P.I. is the name of show and in the other it is simply the name of the character. The title is not simply a string of character without context, it is taken in its entirety. Plain text format destroys that context.

For what it's worth, I partially agree. I don't find it particularly necessary in the given example, but there are certainly multi-word movie titles, where the lack of quote marks would make it a bit difficult to establish the context on first sight.

If the "use single quotes for bold/italic" rule were limited to cases where the bold/italic formatting is used as a replacement for real quotation marks, I would be very happy.

Unfortunalely, the strict appliance of this rule requires any bold/italic text to be single-quoted. So if the overview reads something like "... Magnum (Tom Selleck) ...", I would have to transcribe it as "... Magnum ('Tom Selleck') ...".

By strictly applying this rule without regard for context and purpose, people create data they aren't satisfied with. As they get more and more tired of those silly "ticks", they again don't ask what purpose a certain formatting serves, they want to blindly copy it. First, it is only bold/italic, then someone comes up with font sizes, then superscript/subscript. But what about the font type, the line spacing, the big initial drop cap, indents...

Bottom line, you cannot blindly copy the overview. Unless you scan the back cover, you have to "translate" it into a target format. That doesn't get easier if you increase the complexity of the target format, it will only get worse.

"That's Sky Blue, not Baby Blue!" 

If the purpose of the ticks is that eventually they will get converted to some kind of text formatting for bold/italics, then we should keep them, continue to use them and wait patiently for Ken to implement the feature and convert the existing ones. Otherwise, having them serves no real purpose.

I would hope that eventually Ken would give us a (very) limited set of text formating commands to use, perhaps in the style of BBCode, that the search function would be able to parse out and ignore when performing text searches on Overviews. No font styles or colors or anything fancy, just the basics like bold, italics, underline. The existing ticks could be converted both online and client-side during a software upgrade down the road.

I don't think half of them would be wrong. I'd say significantly less than half. And finding those errors would be much less work than manually converting or removing existing ticks because a visual change such as bold or italics that don't match an overview is more noticeable than single quotes when making a visual scan of an overview for edits.

As it stands now, you couldn't automatically wipe them out either for the exact same reason, and just about every profile from the last 11 years of DVD releases (yes, it really is an almost 11 year old format) already conforms to the current rule.

Midnit:

It will a lot less than the Coo debacle. On its own it would be a mess but if it is part of several additions, say Studios/Distribution, additional dividers or any of the number of other things that are in the pipeline it won't be bad at all. 300+ hours expense to do just COO still makes me CRAZY.            

Skip