Case in point: New color lists like list of blue tags, which are formatted with bold / italics / underline all over.
I'm pretty sure at some point years ago I liked using this kind of formatting. This was discussed in 2012 (topic #8229) and 2014 (topic #10591).
But in hindsight I have changed my mind, that does not look so good in my opinion. Some people in those discussions seemed to dislike it as well.
These are some of the problems I found with that kind of formatting:
- I think it's really distracting. It's jarring to see that much random formatting together.
- It's easy to get outdated fast. (more on that below)
- We don't need it. The tag count is literally in all posts, not to mention the tag search feature.
- The automated tag count found everywhere displays the exact number, not something vague like bold = between 501 and 5,000 posts.
- Speaking of vague numbers, it does not seem very hard to have a vague guess of how much a tag is used. For instance, I think we already know about the most used tags. I don't need blue eyes to be formatted with bold+italic+underline (blue eyes) which tells me it has more than 50,000 posts. I already know it's a pretty common tag because characters with any given eye color are everywhere.
- The top tier formatting does not tell us much: blue eyes is formatted as bold+italic+underline (blue eyes), which means that tag has more than 50,000 posts. We use it because we haven't come up with how to format tags with more 500,000 posts. (blue eyes has 687,527 posts at the moment)
- It does not seem common or intuituive. Are there many major websites or lists using combinations of bold / italics / underline to express vague quantities of stuff? I know Danbooru itself just lists tags everywhere without formatting them like this.
- It's a bit intimidating to edit. If I add a new tag to a list formatted like that, it seems I will have to check what is the proper bold/italics/underline combination every time.
- It may be confusing at first glance. People need to scroll down to the end of the page to read the legend and understand what's going on, or else it just looks like random formatting for no reason.
About outdated formatting, let's see tag group:hands which was formatted like this in October 2017. It has all those mistakes after only a year and a half:
- hand on own face is bold (hand on own face) when it should be bold and italic (hand on own face)
- hands on own face is bold (hands on own face) when it should be bold and italic (hands on own face)
- hand on another's face is bold (hand on another's face) when it should be bold and italic (hand on another's face)
- hand on own cheek is bold (hand on own cheek) when it should be bold and italic (hand on own cheek)
- flat chest grab is unformatted (flat chest grab) when it should be italic (flat chest grab)
- breast poke is unformatted (breast poke) when it should be italic (breast poke)
- guided breast grab is unformatted (guided breast grab) when it should be italic (guided breast grab)
- and probably more, I didn't check all the tags
To be fair, that list could be updated today, but it also means that all pages with that kind of formatting would need to be updated constantly.
List of blue tags was created recently and seems to be up to date. But for instance blue shorts and blue nails are approaching 5,000 posts. It seems they will soon have to be changed from bold (blue shorts and blue nails) to bold+italic (blue shorts and blue nails).
I'd like to completely remove that kind of formatting from pages like these.
Updated