Facebook Reference HTML

[cahwyguy]

Title
Facebook Reference HTML

Short, concise description of the idea
Provide a short HTML syntax for referencing FB users, equivalent to the notation.

Full description of the ideaI recently had my first FB friend comment on a post. It made me realize there is no easy way to refer to him and link to his FB as I can with LJ posts. I'm suggesting

Comments

[ursamajor]

I like the idea of LJ supporting user-links to Facebook and Twitter and other social sites, so +1 to that part of the OP's suggestion.

I know that referencing Dreamwidth is pretty much a guaranteed poisonous drama-llama in news these days, but I like the syntax they use over there:

username site=website.com>

where the site= part is optional, and website.com could, for LJ's purposes, be substituted with facebook.com, or twitter.com, or dreamwidth.org or insanejournal.com, or heck, even wordpress.com or blogspot.com.

I know long-term LJ users won't like the idea of changing the syntax that much, so maybe just adding the site= attribute to the existing syntax would work better:

<strongusername site=website.com>

I think it's more expandable and sustainable than the originally suggested version, which suggests that all non-LJ people in the future will be "fbusers," when the latest changes have embraced Twitter, too. At some point, the website has to be referenced; otherwise, how do you distinguish ursamajor.dreamwidth from ursamajor.insanejournal from ursamajor.twitter from whoever got the ursamajor username on facebook? ;) And it seems silly to have to create a new attribute for each website LJ decides to support. I suppose this is beyond the scope of the core suggestion, but.

Edit: Also, what about Facebook users who haven't set a username? Do they have some sort of userid? Do they have to set a FB username to comment on an LJ post? I honestly don't know, and am curious how it would affect the functionality of this suggestion.

[cahwyguy]

I'd have no problem with the "site=" approach -- I'm looking for a solution to the problem here, and am not emotionally tied to my specific approach.

Regarding the edit, at minimum they have a full name or a profile#. I would think this would be whatever name they give if they were to attempt to log into LJ.

[jai_dit]

Facebook users have a userid, yes. It's the string of numbers after "/profile.php?id="

[mlady_rebecca]

I like your suggested formatting to linking to other sites, in general:

username

Personally, I'd exclude Facebook from that list. People still don't understand that there is a large number of users who want LJ and Facebook identities to be entirely unconnected.

[cahwyguy]

Why exclude them? If I'm writing a post, I'd be explicitly choosing to mention the person on Facebook. Shouldn't that be my choice as the author of the post?