Rendering issues

October 19, 2007 10:09 PM

I've come across a few issues in my latest AskMefi post related to rendering.

When I previewed, the unadorned <> symbols appeared, despite not being HTML entities. When I posted, they got gobbled up as tags. Then I tried re-posting my question as a comment and the extended characters (≤, ≥ and π) didn't display.

I am running Camino on OS X 10.4.10.

posted by PuGZ to Bugs at 10:09 PM (12 comments total)

It looks okay to me. Your unadorned and extended characters display fine in the question but not in your comment. Safari OS X 10.3.9. But, I have absolutely no idea what your AskMefi question is about :-)
posted by tellurian at 10:17 PM on October 19, 2007

Yeah, I see the same thing as tellurian -- the question looks fine, the comment doesn't. (I'm on Firefox on OS X.)
posted by danb at 10:20 PM on October 19, 2007

Same here. Firefox on XP
posted by puke & cry at 10:22 PM on October 19, 2007

The problem with the question is that several words are missing. I didn't pick up on this because Preview didn't highlight the error, but posting the comment did - thus the bug report. :-)
posted by PuGZ at 10:44 PM on October 19, 2007

When I previewed, the unadorned <> symbols appeared, despite not being HTML entities. When I posted, they got gobbled up as tags.

If I remember correctly this discrepancy between preview and post is a known bug which has remained unfixed for quite a long time.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:21 AM on October 20, 2007

flip cos sin tan arcoss thxz
posted by tellurian at 3:40 AM on October 20, 2007

Use &lt; when you want the less-than symbol <.
Use &gt; for the greater-than symbol >.

> will almost always render uninterpreted unless preceded by a < symbol, in which case the browser will assume everything between the two symbols is a tag. When in doubt, type it out!
posted by ardgedee at 4:18 AM on October 20, 2007

The preview page itself is a known bug which has remained unfixed for quite some time. That hack needs to be brought up to speed.
posted by carsonb at 6:11 AM on October 20, 2007

OK, so it's a known issue. I would have been surprised to find I was the first person to stumble across this.

ardgedee: Usually I catch myself (when posting comments) because if I don't type the HTML entities, the preview is all mixed up. I missed it when asking a question because the behaviour exhibited by that preview is different.
posted by PuGZ at 6:46 AM on October 20, 2007

The really fun part is how, when you hit Preview, some of your carefully typed entity codes are cooked into their equivalent characters in the text entry box. For example, once you've clicked Preview, the text entry box will contain & where it used to contain &amp; and when you click Post, it's the modified text box contents that get cooked again and posted.

The dance you need to remember is: use entities in the text entry box; click Preview to see how it's going to look; click your Back button, to get your original, uncooked text entry box back before making more changes or clicking Post.
posted by flabdablet at 9:55 AM on October 20, 2007

PuGZ: I've never seen ampersand, less-than or greater-than entities misrender. Some others might.
posted by ardgedee at 6:00 PM on October 20, 2007

Use this for math in the future.
posted by phrontist at 4:32 AM on October 22, 2007