Ontological Disproof of God

[emjay]

BBCode isn't really difficult.  It's just a way to manually mark up text so the forum displays it in a certain way.  When anyone writes a post, it's saved in a database.  When someone requests to read a post (by clicking on a thread title), the software transforms the text between the tags.  The actual syntax is trivial:

Code:

[b]this text will be bold[/b]
[i]this text is italicized[/i]
[quote]this text will appear to be quoted[/quote]
etc.

Tags can be nested, so you can have:

Code:

[b]this text is bold and [i]this text is both bold and italic[/i][/b]
[quote] the second quoted text[/quote]
etc.

Why use something like BBCode?  Because there's no real way to save text formatting inside the text data itself.  There are many different character encoding systems, but no internal way to save a string of characters as bold characters, or italic characters, etc.  So, some way to flag them as having different formatting is necessary.

I think that's a very good breakdown, but I think the most likely problem here is that negatio is not familiar with the underlying concepts of HTML etc, the stuff on which this is based. So from that perspective, even this simple breakdown, may be too much without those... call them 'axioms' ...in place about the general structure of the web, web pages, and programming concepts. Like I doubt very much that my mum would be able to make head nor tail of that, no matter how simple it is to you or me, because she would not understand the principles on which it rests.