Instead of having required and unique flags for every field, enforce both
requirements on the first field, and neither on the rest. This mirrors the
subject/body format people are used to in note-taking apps. The subject
defines the object being learnt, and the remaining fields represent properties
of that object.
In the past, duplicate checking served two purposes: it quickly notified the
user that they're entering the same fact twice, and it notified the user if
they'd accidentally mistyped a secondary field. The former behaviour is
important for avoiding wasted effort, and so it should be done in real time.
The latter behaviour is not essential however - a typo is not wasted effort,
and it could be fixed in a periodic 'find duplicates' function. Given that
some users ended up with sluggish decks due to the overhead a large number of
facts * a large number of unique fields caused, this seems like a change for
the better.
This also means Anki will let you add notes as long as as the first field has
been filled out. Again, this is not a big deal: Anki is still checking to make
sure one or more cards will be generated, and the user can easily add any
missing fields later.
As a bonus, this change simplifies field configuration somewhat. As the card
layout and field dialogs are a popular point of confusion, the more they can
be simplified, the better.
Instead of a separate option to hide question, embed the question into the
answer format by default. Users who don't want to see the question can remove
the question fields, and users who want a separator between the question and
answer (or not) can control it in HTML now.
Also, remove obsolete field CSS, and don't accidentally chomp a character on
upgrade.
Previously {{field}} wrapped the field in a span with the field's font
properties. This wasn't obvious, and caused frequent problems with people
trying to combine field and template text, or use field content in dictionary
links.
Now that AnkiWeb has a wizard for configuring the front & back layout, we can
just put the formatting in the template instead.
The old template handling was too complicated, and generated frequent
questions on the forums. By dropping non-active templates we can do away with
the generate cards function, and advanced users can simulate the old behaviour
by using conditional field templates.
