View source link?

Question

This, I know:

• I know that if a question (or answer) has been edited you can click on the revisions link to see the source, and
• I know that if you have enough reputation points you can pretend to edit and see the source, and
• I know that you can do some silly hack-job taking the postid and putting it manually in some other link to see the source.

I know all this already.

However, for users:

• who don't read meta and find out these hacks,
• or don't feel comfortable hacking away at links (on cooking.SE, I mean SeasonedAdvice for example), or
• who have few reputation points, or
• would like to see the original markup (down?) of a question so that they can learn or so that they can better understand the intention of the author,

For those people, (and other lazy bums that don't feel like hacking a URL and would much rather click on a link), would it be possible to add a little link "source" at the bottom of every question and every answer?

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Edit: I'm bringing this up again now since in the past few days I've wanted this two times (over at tex.SE):

1. In this question the original post had an unescaped _ which threw me off and it took me a while to understand that there is something missing from the original post. After looking at the source, I understood the question better.
2. in this question The author had again, unescaped code, this time the code included a <presentation> which was mistaken to be an html tag, and thus did not appear in the text. As you can see from the comments, I got confused and asked some silly questions because of that.

I think that I would use it more than the "link" link, which I never use (that, I can just copy from the addressbar). remember that it already appears (as edit) for high rep users, and for them we should probably not have an additional "source" link, but for the rest of us, it would help.

My main point is that the current hack, for me, is a high enough energy "barrier" that I only try to look at the source if I am fairly confident that something is awry. This should not be the case. I should be able to view the source easily if I want.

I've looked to see if other stackexchange-2.0 site have had a similar discussion: so far I've found:

• tex I think that in some sense, this issue is mostly important for this site, because it is exactly about typesetting and so one needs to be very precise about how the result ends up visually.
• cstheory
• money this is interesting as it shows that you can never have too many ways to see things...apparently the poster found clicking on the "time" of the last edit a confusing way to see the edits...I agree!

Maybe there are more?

Answer 1

You don't need rep to edit any more; even 1 rep and anonymous users can suggest edits.

So, click "edit" to see source, along with the other existing options.

Answer 2

Under this proposal, where the UI might show a 3333 rep. the links link | edit | close | flag on a question, a 700 rep. user could be allows to see link | source | retag | flag instead of link | retag | flag, where source shows ... yes, you guessed it. This looks to me completely consistent with the SOFUX UI approach.

Since I see no reason why this information should be made difficult to find for low rep. users, and since it might improve overall question quality (and let's not forget that giving people the opportunity to do things is usually a Good Thing), I support the proposal.

Postscript — As Konrad Rudolph points out on meta.tex.sx, any user can see the source of any post by putting, e.g., http://tex.stackexchange.com/posts/${QUESTION_NUMBER}/revisions into their web browser. But such a link is only placed on the page if a post has been edited already. So I guess that few <2k rep. users will think of it.