Are HTML entities allowed?

September 21, 2006 1:22 AM

Quick question about HTML entities: are they no longer accepted in comments? I've been trying to use em-dashes like so: [ampersand] [pound sign] 8212 [semi-colon] and this has worked fine until recently. But lately, I've left a trail of comments with ugly "8212;"s all over the place, as if the [ampersand] and [pound sign] were stripped off before post (but after the inline preview).
posted by chrominance to Bugs at 1:22 AM (32 comments total)

testing:

I think — works. — Yep. (in preview, anyway)
posted by taz at 1:48 AM on September 21, 2006

&mdash
posted by davehat at 1:50 AM on September 21, 2006

heh. Well that first em dash was supposed to be ampersand folowed by "mdash" concluding with a semicolon.
posted by taz at 1:50 AM on September 21, 2006

yes, exactly, davehat, with the semicolon at the end.
posted by taz at 1:53 AM on September 21, 2006

with semicolon:

—

without the semicolon:

&mdash
posted by davehat at 1:54 AM on September 21, 2006

Heh, preview is not your friend when trying to help with this...
posted by davehat at 1:55 AM on September 21, 2006

yes, it's weird. After posting, it translates ampersand/amp/semicolon followed by mdash/semicolon as a straight dash, though in preview it shows it correctly. Poop.

Let me try that again... —
posted by taz at 2:02 AM on September 21, 2006

huh. Me confused. It worked that time. I'm just going to pull in my mdash and shuffle off to ampersand. Leave my semicolon out of it.
posted by taz at 2:03 AM on September 21, 2006

It's the non-live preview that'll break it. F'rexample:

—

I pressed 'preview' before posting this.
posted by Plutor at 3:31 AM on September 21, 2006

I knew that was going to happen.
posted by Plutor at 3:31 AM on September 21, 2006

This is why the content of <textarea> tags needs to be HTML-escaped. It would solve all this preview-breaking-stuff malarkey.
posted by chrismear at 4:12 AM on September 21, 2006

The real baffling thing here is, how many of the — above are supposed to be — and how many of the — are supposed to be —.

This comment looks OK in preview. Now, lets press the "Do Voodoo" "Post Comment" button and see what we get....
posted by davehat at 4:43 AM on September 21, 2006

Classic.
posted by davehat at 4:43 AM on September 21, 2006

What?
posted by OmieWise at 5:56 AM on September 21, 2006

Heh. The all look like — em dashes to me. (Option+Apple+-)
posted by klangklangston at 6:18 AM on September 21, 2006

What?

The insight was obviously devoured by live preview.
posted by peacay at 6:32 AM on September 21, 2006

What klangklangston said: just type the emdash character, and don't bother with entity encoding. That will work just fine in every browser that can correctly display UTF-8.

The only entities that are required to be escaped in XHTML are < (<) and & (&).

(Yes, > is a valid character and is not required to be escaped.)
posted by ijoshua at 6:45 AM on September 21, 2006

(Although, it’s option–shift–-)
posted by ijoshua at 6:47 AM on September 21, 2006

187;♥171;
(Should it work, this comment contains both numbered and and mend entities.)
posted by If I Had An Anus at 6:51 AM on September 21, 2006

Weird, it, uh, also chenges 'named' to 'mend'! =)
posted by If I Had An Anus at 6:51 AM on September 21, 2006

ijoshua writes "(Yes, > is a valid character and is not required to be escaped.)"

Becareful though because the validator will strip a / followed by a > I think. Let's see: />
posted by Mitheral at 7:07 AM on September 21, 2006

Nope, guess it's ok.
posted by Mitheral at 7:07 AM on September 21, 2006

QWERTY QWERTIE
posted by thatweirdguy2 at 7:09 AM on September 21, 2006

entity encoding was removed when someone showed me some really easy hacks you could use it to do. It was possible to entity encode all sorts of nasty remote scripting stuff.

If you want an emdash, just copy and paste the character in or do the ampersand-mdash-semicolon, don't use the character entity.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:21 AM on September 21, 2006

Does this by chance have anything to do with why the spell-check link is gone (OS X 10.4.7 and Firefox 1.0.7)?
posted by sourwookie at 7:47 AM on September 21, 2006

Ignore my above comment, I did some poking around.
posted by sourwookie at 7:48 AM on September 21, 2006

&emdash; works fine, use that.
posted by delmoi at 2:26 PM on September 21, 2006

oops mdash, I mean.
posted by delmoi at 2:26 PM on September 21, 2006

I, in my obvious authority, declare this thread closed!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 4:42 PM on September 21, 2006

This is what happens when I forget to check back on Metatalk8212;lots of people post, the problem appears solved, and I have no idea if it actually is or not—at least, until I publish this post.

(first entity 8212, second entity mdash, both appear fine in live preview, 8212 screws up on pressing the preview button... what. the. correcting...)
posted by chrominance at 9:43 PM on September 24, 2006

Hmm. &mdash; it is. Thanks delmoi!
posted by chrominance at 9:43 PM on September 24, 2006

Thanks delmoi?
posted by davehat at 2:43 AM on October 17, 2006