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Possible Duplicate:
Add markdown support for hidden-until-you-click text (aka spoilers)

Possible Duplicate:
Implement the <spoiler> tag

[Apparently I committed some sort of grave sin in *gasp* discussing a potential feature for a proposed StackExchange site in the discussion zone for StackExchange site proposals. Was brusquely told to do it here instead. Anyhoo...]

Proposal: Movies

On IMDB, they cover spoilers as shown in the image below, and it reveals the text when you put your mouse cursor over it. Adding an easy way to do this in markdown would be a great feature for this site.

enter image description here
(Excerpt from the description of violence and gore in The Sixth Sense in case you were wondering.)

You can kind of do this already for an entire paragraph with ">!" like this:

Boo!

However this is a) not obvious to the reader, whereas the above is, and b) is block level only. You can't hide a sentence within a paragraph for instance.

Coda

As discussed in the comments, this was closed as the >! mark-up facilitates hidden text. I'll also note that the way IMDB does it and the way SE does it are with very similar CSS properties, so if we really wanted the hidden text covered with a red spoiler warning for a specific site, instead of just being invisible, it would be a very simple CSS tweak.

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    It's hard enough getting new features for existing sites; do we really need to start coding stuff for proposals that are 12% committed? Particularly features that essentially already exist?
    – Michael Mrozek
    Feb 12 '11 at 7:26
  • I agree, we do not need to start coding stuff for proposals, not matter what percentage of commitment they have. But it seems warped to be tsk'd at for discussing what may be a useful feature for a particular site. If nothing else the officiousness of it all certainly dampens ones enthusiasm to participate in the process.
    – Evan
    Feb 12 '11 at 8:24
  • With regard to it "essentially already exists", if you looked at my original sin you would see I obviously did not know this until a polite user answered with the ">!" markup, so I added that information when I reentered the suggestion here, and also gave my reasons why I don't think it is satisfactory. Feel free to debate my reasoning and the merits of my proposed feature, but please stop trying to tread on me.
    – Evan
    Feb 12 '11 at 8:29
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    possible duplicate of Implement the <spoiler> tag (note, this question was marked as status-declined) I personally think that The Team should reconsider their decision though with all of these new SE sites where spoilers can exist in questions. In the mean time, just tag any questions that contain spoilers with a spoiler tag. That's what gaming.se is doing
    – Earlz
    Feb 12 '11 at 9:48
  • Thanks for the feedback, Earlz. I think you're right that it is a duplicate (especially given that the ">!" markup was implemented in response to that request). I agree with you that is should probably be reconsidered, but suspect we would be pushing the proverbial up hill to get it.
    – Evan
    Feb 12 '11 at 11:17
  • @Earlz, I disagree the team should reconsider that feature request, which specifically asks for <spoiler>. Like Jeff explained: We really don't want to be in the business of making up new HTML tags [...] Note that the content is not only used on the SE websites, but the API, data dumps etcetera might be used by others too. (Note that Add markdown support for hidden-until-you-click text (aka spoilers) is [status-completed].)
    – Arjan
    Feb 12 '11 at 13:39
  • @Arjan. Yes, you are correct. This should be closed as a duplicate of that instead and also tagged with status-complete. I've flagged it for moderator attention
    – Earlz
    Feb 12 '11 at 18:38

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