This may be a little bit overboard depending on what you are practicing and if you know this already, I apologize.
Some software I think like Latex and it's WYSIWYM cousin Lyx, holds this concept of never use bold, italics, underline until you have typed all your text.
Some novel writing concepts also hold this minimum, no working/editing on your header and chapters until you have written out all the stories and filled all the section.
For images, you can slow down the necessity of worrying about the anchor by creating a placemark instead. If you can Ascii art it, I guess it helps but mostly instead of [ Invalid Attachment ] you can type in:
[mood: warm]
Every prolonged bloody war gets to a point where a dad must appreciate the birth of their only child before the sunset drops hours after the red hot noon.
[face: bearded] Athalaxix the warlord:
How goes the siege?
[face: young] ???:
It goes...ACK!!! [spurt: blood]
It's not really advisable but if you really have a hard time grasping the attach and the browse box, placemarking without attaching an image helps disassociating yourself from the task and hones you in on how everything in a forum editor is essentially an anchor concept.
For example, you attach an image from browse (which opens your machine) and so once you are in the link inline image box stage instead of thinking this attach thing goes here or image 1 should be in attach 1, you already have a concept that attach 1 should replace placeholder x.
For example [face: young] will be deleted for an image.
When you start getting this consistent world view of forum editors, everything churns in a singular pattern of placemark -> attach.
Insert quote button once clicked attaches a placemark of the quote.
Titles above posts once clicked attaches a jump towards the post you are talking about.
Example, Hey, IainB, could you please supply me with a How-To for the Click to Reveal/Hide box in your
Reply #4 here? I can't seem to figure it out by myself.
Try clicking the blue link in that sentence and see where it loads differently from when you did it.
When you can do that, concepts like tables, permalinks, attaching images versus pasting image urls...they all start to function the same mechanically i.e. they are all one and the same. Clicking a button like SP and writing
Spoiler
has the same role as typing [url] or writing
. It's all anchoring something inside and it's all replacing what's inside and turning it into what you want it to be turned.
There are no real differences. The boxes are all the same. The anchors all hook something. plus image is image hooked and pulling anchor to the center while image is in turn hooked to [ Invalid Attachment ].
Sometimes (apparently not in the case of spoilers), you can even cheat because when you quote someone's post, the editor is forced to unhide the newly born image and roll back to all the formatting that you see when you or that person is typing. Like if you quote my text here now, you'll see in the posting window how things were written. Where things were messed up. Where things formatted correctly. It's like you have an editor for the thing I wrote even if you didn't type it.
