Quoting, Dashes, and Thread Errors..., ...Oh My! Options

[Ol' Scratch]

Although it's probably been brought up (I couldn't find anything after a quick search), a bug occured in the Alright. Cyberlimbs. Why the hate? thread.

It apparently had to do with -Nyx-'s name and the automatic quoting feature. I had to edit the linked post in order to fix the thread, and posts didn't start to mess up until the post that followed. Note that the post that followed quoted the same thing I did as well. No idea if it's relevant but thought I'd mentioned it anyway.

[eidolon]

Hmm. The edit you made must have fixed the more overt problems. Either that or I need coffee worse than I thought. :D

What was it doing?

[Ol' Scratch]

It did fix it. :)

It caused the thread to crash from the header of my post and the very first line of it where -Nyx-'s name appeared til, well, the end of the thread. Some kind of [Report] button showed up on the second line as did another button (whose name I can't remember right now). Then there was about an inch or two of grey whitespace, then the blue bar with Next Oldest, Next Newest, etc. and the rest of the page as normal.

But my post and the one following it (the only other one in the thread at the time) were gobbled up. This did not occur, however, until the poster below me posted, including the same quote I was quoting. My post showed up fine prior to that and didn't mess up until the second guy did his.

Oh, and the part where it normally says the poster's name before the quote, it was replaced with normal white text and a <!--QUOTEBEGINS tag, or something like that.

My guess is the page somehow confused the above tag and the - in -Nyx-'s name, causing it to ignore any opening tags in between the two. But I dunno. Should have taken a screen capture and grabbed the source code but I wasn't thinking at the time.

[Kagetenshi]

The comment tag for quoting is <!--QuoteBegin-[username]+[date]-->. The key is, though, HTML comments don't end at "-->", or even the closing tag ">" (though the closing tag is required)--they end at any pair of raw dashes. As a result, -Nyx-'s name in the comment was closing the comment, but there was still stuff afterwards, which IIRC is undefined (violation of spec). That's what screwed everything up.

Edit: also, someone got lazy and just commented out the "report" button, which is probably why it showed back up when commenting went all wacky.

Edit^2: also, Dumpshock does something deeply weird with the Location (there's a br that's getting "closed" with a left-curly-bracket). Looks like there's some fixing to do, folks :)

~J

[Kagetenshi]

Ok, after breaking the thread briefly I discovered a few things. First off, Safari apparently doesn't break on that spec violation, but it is a spec violation—as I thought, it doesn't like characters that are outside of the comment (terminated by the double dashes) but still inside the comment declaration. I take back what I said about the proper handling being undefined, there may be a "correct" way to render this—IIRC it was one of the things ACID2 tested.

I thought there was a second thing, but I don't remember what it was. I'm not sure what the best fix is—endashes are too large, and escape characters are ugly.

~J

[mfb]

use this:

[Kagetenshi]

The problem is that the thing what breaks is inside an HTML comment, so it doesn't get rendered—it won't show up as that, just as a literal & #45; . It makes as much sense as anything to replace the dashes with, but it's still ugly.

~J

[mfb]

[mfb]

dang. it actually renders the html special char and then puts it in.

hey, i know what would fix this. just hardcode a space after everybody's name in the autoquote thing. alternatively, fix the html standard (or at least the rendering on all browsers) so that > actually ends the tag, instead of --.

[eidolon]

FYI: We're hoping that the upcoming software upgrade fixes this problem (and a couple of others). Since it's coming up so soon, it's not really worth trying to hack the code into this version.

If the update doesn't fix it, we'll address it then.

[Kagetenshi]

[Ol' Scratch]

Wouldn't it just be easier to just remove the addition of a comment completely so that it becomes a non-issue? Or is it being used by the stylesheet or something? I only have a basic understanding of it all.

[Adam]

We'll be upgrading to the new version of the forum software within the next couple weeks, and after that, if the problem persists in the new version, it will be fixed.

[Kagetenshi]