Images?
Audio?
VIDEO?!
/me drops monocle
I don't mean to come across as a Luddite. I like a lot of the cool new toys which have been wheeled out lately. Maybe this will actually require only a very minor code change to implement and everything will come up roses. In which case, I'll shut up. But I voted against this.
- Frankly, I lack artistic skill. I hesitate to generalise, but I believe many other noders would be able to say the same - our unifying attribute is our interest in and enthusiasm for writing (and each other); everything else about us is infinitely variable. Sure, some of us could improve a few of our factuals with nice photographs or video clips, but as for the rest of us, the change would not affect us because we wouldn't be able to take advantage of it.
- Whatever happened, words would remain the killer app of E2, and an image or video on its own would never be permitted to stand alone as a node.
- It seems to me that the current solution - providing a URL leading to the media file in question, which is hosted elsewhere - already suffices.
- If we're talking about hosting, not just embedding/hotlinking, then, from a bandwidth point of view, a relatively small picture is worth several thousand words, and audio and video are much worse still. Won't there be bandwidth issues?
- Newcomers. Well... I worry that they'll get the wrong end of the stick. I worry that they may start to arrive in greater numbers, not just because images and videos are suddenly allowed, but solely for the images and videos. Possibly not the sort of newcomers we want.
So, overall, I guess my general point is that there are other improvements to E2 which I would much rather see take priority. How about fixing the homenode image uploading system? Or a vote button in that poll I just linked to? And it would be nice if we could replace the majority of the firmlinks with proper instant redirects. I'd also rather like to have a writeup footer template to complement the writeup header template, so that I can put my vote buttons (and other writeup info) at the bottom of a writeup, where I'll see them after I've finished reading the node. Making many of these cool-and-extremely-useful new JavaScript toys standard for new and guest users would be awesome too. And so on...