"That's what I had in mind [preview button]. People who could care less about previews would not use it, people who wanted to see the formatting of their post would click the preview button and then click the post button if they were satisfied."

i know this is what most of you have in mind, but i respectfully disagree taht its all that intuitive to a newbie. i have seen, time and time again, newbies (and even sleepy regulars) hit 'preview' meaning to post, and thinking it did. this happens on sites like wikipedia, etc. its like any problem of having more than one button that means "do something with this form information". its a tricky user-interface design problem.

that is not to say, however, that it cant be solved. perhaps the way (this is what i think when i edit pages with nearly identical POST and PREVIEW buttons) is to sorta hide the preview one... make it a semi-advanced user feature, by having users need to *find it*. (aside: ui design is a huge field and lots of different schools of thought, so this thread could go on forever......)

i guess that may be the solution then, somehow design a 'preview' button that simply wont (or very unlikely wont) get pressed unless you mean it. that, to me, would be ideal. i would be happy with that.

oh, and as for the flash cat that i let outta the bag -- i dont mean to *replace* the standard interface; only allow a flash option. for sure. mostly it has to do with the state of back-message browsing, which, frankly SUCKS now! (i can say that cuz i wrote it!) flash (etc) allows for a lot more flexibility in displaying hairy information like message threads, etc. imho anyway. actually, that is another ui design problem which i think NO ONE has really solved ... not that i have seen. so, i guess, in the meantime, we sit tight as-is. -grin- maybe i will work on an html preview for, oh, 2006?