Can we ban the use of the tag?

October 8, 2001 2:59 PM

Can we ban the use of the <font> tag? Or at least run a test to make sure if someone opens an HTML tag they have to close it? If I have to read one more shrunken thread I'm going to scream.
posted by mrbula to Feature Requests at 2:59 PM (16 comments total)

This case got even worse when I tried to close the font tag. It fixed things in Netscape but completely screwed over the text in IE. Then someone else closed another font tag, and now it looks fine in IE, but on Netscape I'm looking at what seems to be 20pt. text.

(Also, why would anyone use the font tag these days, anyway?)
posted by mrbula at 3:02 PM on October 8, 2001

parisp was responsible, he opened a font size+2 then closed it with font size-2.

Yeah, I can kill the font tag from all inputs.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:08 PM on October 8, 2001

Try using Opera in user mode or making a user style sheet in IE (if you know how and want to go to the trouble of disabling and enabling it when you need it). Mozilla should support user style sheets, but I don’t have it installed on this system, so I can’t check.

Unfortunately, unless you take MetaFilter into account specially, it will look pretty bad (the same goes for a lot of the Web). Oh well. There’s always the </everytagIcanthinkof> approach.
posted by gleemax at 3:51 PM on October 8, 2001

Matt, please don't kill the FONT tag. I and others use it often for asides or snarky epilogues. Kill it on the original post if you must, but please leave a sizeable amount of room for color commentary... (Pardon the puns)
posted by fooljay at 5:32 PM on October 8, 2001

isn't that what the smallcopy tag is for, fooljay?
posted by moz at 5:59 PM on October 8, 2001

(guess not... never mind)
posted by moz at 5:59 PM on October 8, 2001

How about a script that parses all ocurrences of "<font" and "</font>" in a submission? If the numbers don't match, the post is rejected. The same could be applied to ""<i>" and "</i>", "<b>" and "</b>", etc.

If you'd like to do this client-side (not ideal solution, but better than nothing), or in VBScript server-side I'm happy to write the script for you. Hey, maybe there's already something out there.
posted by normy at 6:09 PM on October 8, 2001

Jay, you could always get around it by using <span> and setting the style inline.

Matt, please don't kill the SPAN tag.
posted by megnut at 8:01 PM on October 8, 2001

Ahh yesssss, good call, Meg.
posted by fooljay at 10:24 AM on October 9, 2001

I've been thinking about this: it's the same for any tag you might want to allow (such as bold), and yet banning them all would seem to be disengenius.

When I used to frequent html chat rooms in the nether years (bless my little heart), the non-closing tags issue got solved by

1. certain well-meaning people putting close tags for all the popular tags at the atart of their screen names, so that whenever they posted anything they would kill any open tag in the room.

2. the monitors noticing this and adding the close tags automatically to the start of each post.

Personally, I think we could skip to 2.

posted by walrus at 11:14 AM on October 9, 2001

start
posted by walrus at 11:15 AM on October 9, 2001

Matt, please don't kill the VAR tag.
posted by rodii at 11:21 AM on October 9, 2001

the monitors noticing this and adding the close tags automatically to the start of each post

*GASP* But....That...Doesn't....Validate!!
posted by fooljay at 2:29 PM on October 9, 2001

mea culpa
posted by walrus at 3:05 AM on October 10, 2001

de nada
posted by fooljay at 12:22 PM on October 10, 2001

;)
posted by walrus at 4:39 PM on October 10, 2001