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I was thinking the other day how cool it'd be to be able to hide so-called "metadata" inside otherwise "publicly visible" content, perhaps explaining how/why something was worded or formatted a certain way, or to embed hidden requests for grammatical improvement, etc.

These could then be taken into account by other editors, and it would make altering other people's posts a much less tense/stressful experience in certain circumstances.

EDIT: I see it's possible to use HTML comments to achieve this, so now my question is, can the use of HTML comments to embed information to/for other editors be popularized/encouraged? I can see it now... a dedicated tab, perhaps titled "Meta", which would tell everyone about the option:

Screenshot showing meta tab

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    Can you give an example of how that'd look like?
    – slhck
    Feb 3, 2014 at 8:57
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    More importantly, an example where that would be necessary.
    – user98085
    Feb 3, 2014 at 9:00
  • I don't think people will add this kind of thing to their post, unless they felt it was important - in which case they'd put it in the post proper. When in doubt about editing something, you could ask the OP for clarification before editing.
    – S.L. Barth is on codidact.com
    Feb 3, 2014 at 9:01
  • I've updated the post with a visual idea of how it might look. And I agree, it wouldn't be universally useful, but a niche of users would probably find it helpful (like myself! :P).
    – i336_
    Feb 3, 2014 at 11:06

1 Answer 1

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How about HTML comments?

The foo must be used to bar the baz.

<!-- Note to editors: The wording "You must use the foo to bar the baz" is
ambiguous in the context of this programming environment; please do not
use it. -->

My sincere apologies for the poor example; this was all I could think of.

They're easy to use, and produce no overhead at all on normal viewing (the Markdown-to-HTML parsing just drops them on the floor).

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  • Interesting! I was thinking that this concept would be conceptualized after HTML comments in implementation, but I had no idea that the parser didn't actually strip <!-- --> from submissions.
    – i336_
    Feb 3, 2014 at 9:22

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