Request for ideone, and JSFiddle Buttons

Question

JSFiddle

On posts labeled HTML, JavaScript, or CSS, there should be a button labeled "Create Fiddle". The code in the posts may be sorted by the following rules. The first to match is considered correct. If none match, none are considered correct.

• More < and > than { and } is HTML (minimum 4 brackets)
• CSS if contains equal or greater number of colons than semicolons
• JavaScript if
  • contains 1 or more semicolons
  • one or more "var" or "function", or three or more other JavaScript keywords
  • reason being other keywords are common in other languages

Ideone

If tagged with a language supported by Ideone, other than JavaScript.

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Workflow

The user is shown a button, like the one on the right.

Upon clicking it, StackOverflow makes an API call to host the code on JSFiddle.net. The URL is returned by posting a comment as the user that clicks Create Fiddle. The user is also redirected to the fiddle, via an _blank target on the link.

As with other automatic comments, the user may make changes to the comment, or remove it. If they feel it doesn't transfer well to a fiddle, the commend may be removed. If there's a glitch in the processing of the post; the user may fix the fiddle, click Update, and amend their comment to contain the new URL.

The same applies to Ideone, and their Clone feature.

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Overall, this would improve answer speed. The worst case scenario, is that the user clicked the button, and it just didn't work. A few seconds lost on occasion is made up for by the massive collective time saved, and the benefit of more interactive solutions on StackOverflow.

Answer 1

I don't think this is a good idea.

Questions should really stand on their own without requiring those who wish to answer clicking on links which take them to other pages, let alone other sites.

For code in questions post the minimum code that demonstrates the problem. This doesn't have to be a complete working example, but enough that people can paste into an empty project (of whatever flavour) and see the problem reproduce. You never know, in reducing the code this way you might even solve your own problem.

Similarly code in answers should be enough to demonstrate the solution.

There's nothing to stop you posting a link to the complete solution as shortcut for people, but it should only ever be as a backup or reference for your question or answer.

Answer 2

I think this is a terrible idea as suggested, but I think the goal is a good one - making it easier for people to help answer questions by making live demos more accessible. Being able to quickly run some code is a huge benefit.

I really don't like the amount of dependency on external demo sites, jsfiddle in particular. Being able to access SO but have jsfiddle loading like molasses is very frustrating and happens to me all the time.

What I would love to see is an official demo site for Stack Overflow. I think it would solve a lot of problems, especially those concerning the longevity of the content. jsfiddle has no obligation to keep their site active or archive their content forever, although they do say SO makes up about 30% of their traffic, and people work around this all the time, posting questions and answers where the relevant content is hidden behind a jsfiddle link.

Until SO gets their own official code demo tools, anything else is just beating around the bush.

Answer 3

I think it's a good idea, provided the rule for "questions/answers must stand on their own" is still honored.

I've got a Chrome extension that I installed for other purposes, but it has the nice feature of turning SO's code blocks into ones with jsFiddle import capability. It's somewhat rough (doesn't pick up that disparate blocks should be for the same fiddle, and can't link to existing fiddles), but it does provide some enhancements to the current code blocking.

Here's what my interface looks like:

Octopress has a good example for their code blocking with allowing for links to external places, which then show up in the title. This may require some kind of code fencing, or adding an additional HTML comment to work into the way SE's markdown processing works.

I don't think the "create fiddle" button is entirely necessary, but I do think something a little more friendly to code-running sites, in the absence of a Stack-hosted tool, would help with answering questions.

This does not mean that answers and questions should not stand on their own. However, the HTML/CSS/JS people already use jsFiddle extensively, and things like ideone have the potential to be beneficial to the users of other languages, especially when it comes to interface or runtime behaviors, where demo + code block provides more benefit than code block alone.

The idea here would be that the answers and questions would stand on their own, just as they do now, with the same standards as now, but with the added option of exporting or linking to a place that can run the code in question (saving people the time of setting up a local environment for something that would take 5 seconds to run in one of the web environments).