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August 25, 2008 10:26 PM

Pony Request: Could we preserve italics in the 'popular favorites' excerpts for comments?

I was reading the Popular Favorites page today, and came across this comment by Pope Guilty that confused me for a moment until I clicked through to the actual one:

'And btw unless y'all plan on kicking people of faith out of this country You are 80% of the country and you do not get to play aggrieved party here.'

The first sentence is italicized, and the second sentence isn't. I understand removing line breaks for the sake of being concise on that particular page, but I'd rather it look like this:

'And btw unless y'all plan on kicking people of faith out of this country You are 80% of the country and you do not get to play aggrieved party here.'

For the Popular Favorites posts (on the same page), both bold and italics formatting is preserved, but they aren't for the comments. Since italics are often used to quote someone and then to respond to them, keeping things consistent and also preserving italics (and bold) for the comments on this page would be a tiny detail that would make things much more clearer. Please please?

posted by suedehead to Feature Requests at 10:26 PM (34 comments total)

Double or single quotation marks are a common solution to this problem.
Alternatively, blockquotes.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:29 PM on August 25, 2008

Oh, seconded. This often bugs me and it's an easy fix (right?).
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:31 PM on August 25, 2008

Oh HELLS yeah.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:03 PM on August 25, 2008

I should have been clever enough to start using quote marks or user_x said: prefixes, but since I don't and I tend to respond to a lot of... questionable comments, going through my favorited comments is very often a little disconcerting and unclear.

It would be nice if the fix was retroactive to respect basic formatting html. But it's not a big deal to me.
posted by loquacious at 11:05 PM on August 25, 2008

I love this pony. Please please please Santa - can we keep him?
posted by DarlingBri at 11:31 PM on August 25, 2008

FDG: Blockquotes won't work.. they'll be stripped out too.
posted by pompomtom at 11:51 PM on August 25, 2008

Yes, I know, should have been clearer, and support this pony.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 11:54 PM on August 25, 2008

Yes, this would be a good thing.
posted by timeistight at 12:58 AM on August 26, 2008

I'll have pb get on this immediately, you are all correct that this is a simple fix that will add functionality to the site.
posted by Meatbomb at 1:01 AM on August 26, 2008 [3 favorites]

OK, I'm no moderator (not even on the astral plane) so I don't have a definitive answer for this, but I think the reason italics are dropped on the Popular Favorites page (as opposed to the tab, which doesn't feature comments) is because the comments are excerpted, and if any one of the comments opens italics <i> then gets cut off before the close italics </i> comes along, it wreaks havoc on the rest of the page. Apparently there's no way around it given the current formatting, even though regular ol' unpopular comments that open the tag and leave it open are cleaned up nicely. IMO if they're so popular we oughta be able to read the whole damn thing on that page. Maybe lose the columnar layout and tab it up like all the other little metameta-pages.
posted by carsonb at 2:04 AM on August 26, 2008

Meatbomb, your username is disturbingly easy to misread as mathowie when you speak so authoritatively
posted by blasdelf at 2:05 AM on August 26, 2008

"IMO...we oughta...read the whole damn thing...and tab it up..."

Sorry. It's late and the vernacular squirts out when I'm tired.
posted by carsonb at 2:11 AM on August 26, 2008

Is it sad that I could tell, without looking first, that konolia made the italicized comment?
posted by oaf at 3:57 AM on August 26, 2008

Fiasco da Gama: "Double or single quotation marks are a common solution to this problem."

Better yet, force everyone to use MefiQuote so that even with the HTML elided, there will be the name of the quotee.
posted by Plutor at 6:02 AM on August 26, 2008

Also, can renew my request for this related pony, that seemed to get general approval, but didn't get any decision from the mods
posted by jpdoane at 6:15 AM on August 26, 2008

> ... if any one of the comments opens italics then gets cut off before the close italics comes along, it wreaks havoc on the rest of the page.

This is probably the case. Simple, crude solution: Salt the end of each block with a few close-italic and close-bold tags. Less crude solution: Parse the text for unclosed tags and generate the closers as needed.
posted by ardgedee at 7:09 AM on August 26, 2008

I'm impressed, oaf, particularly as I didn't recognize it immediately myself.
posted by konolia at 7:20 AM on August 26, 2008

Sounds like all comments should be in their own IFRAME, then any bad html wouldn't affect other comments. And we could add scrollbars for long ones.

I'm just sayin'...

and images. vive la tag de l'image!
posted by blue_beetle at 8:17 AM on August 26, 2008

blue_beetle: "Sounds like all comments should be in their own IFRAME"

GRAGHRgagrarAGHAH
*asplodes*
posted by Plutor at 8:53 AM on August 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

I have a similar problem when I read the site from my phone. Opera Mini strips all the italics and bold text from Recent Comments, and it has been a constant source of confusion and amusement as I read and wonder why people are making bold declarations and then one line down arguing bitterly with themselves.
posted by quin at 9:11 AM on August 26, 2008

konolia: I'm impressed, oaf, particularly as I didn't recognize it immediately myself.

I never recognize my own comments. A lot of times, I'll be reading through old threads, and I start to read one comment, and I'll be saying to myself, "wow, what a great comment." Then I'll see my username underneath it.

Doesn't this happen to everybody?

C'mon. Admit it. You all say to yourselves "wow, what a great comment" when you're reading my comments. Right?
posted by koeselitz at 9:44 AM on August 26, 2008 [1 favorite]

Doesn't this happen to everybody?

Totally. But I've actually also said "Wow, this guy sound a bit like an ass..." and then seen my nic, so you know, YMMV.
posted by quin at 9:52 AM on August 26, 2008

To tack an extra leg on that pony: Please don't add an ellipsis if the excerpt fully contains the comment or post.
posted by ardgedee at 9:55 AM on August 26, 2008

This is a great comment.
And I agree.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:47 AM on August 26, 2008

I think this issue was brought up before re: Recent Activity; my recollection is precisely as carsonb describes; it was fixed somehow, possibly by instituting some kind of comment length threshold vis-a-vis excerpt or no, or by increasing same, and/or by auto-closing all the tags after each comment as in the actual thread.

Also, they made it do that neat fadey-outy thing.
posted by Sys Rq at 11:01 AM on August 26, 2008

save the endangered italics, maaaaaan.
posted by boo_radley at 11:16 AM on August 26, 2008

Appending a trailing italic tag is kind of gruesome, but it's hard to shorten the structured data after you've thrown it into a DOM parser. But then, the whole quoted-text thing is problematic with the favorites anyway, because quite often the comment begins with a quote and the entire truncated favorite looks like it's the quote rather than the response. Anyone reading it will think that the harebrained nonsense being quoted got favorited 371 times instead of the brilliant and withering riposte.

I'd suggest throwing it in the DOM parser, then discard all the subnodes and just display the text that remains. If after stripping leading and trailing whitespace the size of the result is 0 (meaning they put everything in some kind of tag) or on any DOM parsing failure failure (you do have exception handling, right?) you just fall back to the old behavior.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:33 AM on August 26, 2008

Hmm.. except discarding subnodes would result in gibberish if the comment contained, for example, words in bold. So you're probably better off just truncating the comment, scanning it for tags, incrementing a counter for every open instance of any given tag and decrementing it for every close instance, and whatever number you have left for each kind of tag found, append the corresponding close tag. Like I said, gruesome.
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:46 AM on August 26, 2008

George_Spiggott: "I'd suggest throwing it in the DOM parser, then discard all the subnodes and just display the text that remains."

Applying that algorithm to your comment simply yields a missing word in the parenthetical phrase.
posted by Plutor at 11:47 AM on August 26, 2008

Damn you, G.S.
posted by Plutor at 11:47 AM on August 26, 2008

I don't know what these two are raving on about, but I certainly support the original request. At least if the text was in italics, you could reasonably assume that it was a quote and possibly not the poster's words.
posted by dg at 2:02 PM on August 26, 2008

I'm djgh, and I approve this pony.
posted by djgh at 8:53 PM on August 26, 2008

I think -- it's a little hazy, but I'm pretty sure -- that last night I dreamed that this feature got implemented. I was so happy.

oh god please help me
posted by PercussivePaul at 10:19 AM on August 27, 2008

I noticed the same thing just last night! It definitely helps if you put quotes around the thing you're putting in italics, but many people don't, and even having just said that it's important, I forget most of the time.

I don't think the bit about 'closing' the tags is the issue people are making it out to be. Transform blockquote, em, and i tags into i's. (Since a blockquote there would probably mess up formatting.) And there's obviously already code to handle unclosed tags: otherwise people who forget to close a link or an italics tag would be screwing up the whole page here.

So yes, 'user behavior' (using quotes instead of just italics) can help... But I think this might be an easy pony (oh dear god, no sick jokes over that) to make, versus trying to get everyone to always do things a certain way.
posted by fogster at 1:33 PM on August 27, 2008