If I do it that way on my PC, I find that I need to click twice (not the same as a double-click), once to create the opening tag and again to create the closing tag. A single, unpaired tag will cause subsequent tags to be applied incorrectly.

But an alternative -- at least on my PC -- is to type the text first, then select/highlight it (using click-drag or click followed by shift-click) and click on the "quote" icon. That inserts an opening tag just before the highlighted section and a closing tag immediately after, i.e., encloses the highlighted text within appropriate quote tags.

And just in case anyone doesn't know what we mean by "tags", they are special instructions to the software that formats the posts for C.net, telling it how to "highlight" a segment of text. Each "opening" tag -- a word enclosed in square brackets -- says to start highlighting the text in a particular way, e.g., in italics, larger size, or particular color, by enclosing it in a quote box, or whatever. (Some opening tags can also contain additional information, such as the poster's name and time when a quoted post was posted.) A closing tag to match an opening tag musts contain the same key word, but preceded by a slash.

Here are a few examples of opening and closing tag pairs. This list has been created by using the "code" tags, which causes the enclosed text to be displayed precisely as entered, including extra spaces and tags, displaying the tags rather than interpreting them. (I have not included a pair of "code" tags. Can you guess why? )

I just checked to see if I was remembering incorrectly (or a previous incarnation of the Invision interface) but I was right: Clicking the quote icon brings up: just as clicking the code icon (#) brings up opening and closing code tags.Nope. On my Mac (and I just tried it with the above quote, hoping and expecting it would work) it does the same thing it would do without any selected text: it places a pair of tags at the end of any entered text.Read your Hofstadter.

Edited to correct the spelling of the word "edited."

(I've included the extended quote at the end, so you don't have to scroll down to see my comment, or at all if you remember what David said.)

Interesting! I've confirmed my own results in two different browsers under Windows... Mozilla (same as Netscape) and MS Internet Explorer. That makes sense, since the browser should know nothing about how Invision is generating non-HTML tags.

So it appears that the Mac version of the Invision software exhibits different behavior than does the Windows version. I wonder why.

I personally think that the most appropriate behavior in both environments would be to enclose any selected (highlighted) text (as under Windows) but insert a tag pair if nothing is selected (as on the Mac, which is really just enclosing that "nothing") in all cases. Among other things, this would help prevent the tags getting out of synch, though careless editing could still do so.

I wonder whether Invision is deliberately retaining an old incompatibility so that existing users don't have to learn new behavior, even though that ignores the fact that users of both operating systems have to learn two different sets of behavior. I think a recommendation should be made to Invision that they implement the "enclose highlighted, even if empty" behavior across all platforms.