Italics tag gone awry October 15, 2009 5:00 PM   Subscribe

Interesting bug: I forgot to close an italics tag the other day, and it seems to have affected my comment history. Will this be a problem for future generations of MeFites?
posted by SeizeTheDay to Bugs at 5:00 PM (13 comments total)

The site will actually auto-close unclosed tags at this point, at comment-submission time, so if you check the source on that first comment you'll see a pair of trailing </i> tags at the end of the comment (to match the pair of <i> tags you accidentally bracketed the initial quoted portion with).

The actual problem looks like a failure of the excerpting code to proper close the tags left open by the abridgment of the comment for the commenting history page—maybe the parser closed the one i tag and called it good, not expecting them to be strictly (and pointlessly) stacked like that? pb would know better than me.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:11 PM on October 15, 2009


Yep, the stacked <i>s were causing the problem. I went ahead and edited the comment, so things should be back to normal.
posted by pb (staff) at 5:22 PM on October 15, 2009


Sweet. Thanks!
posted by SeizeTheDay at 5:27 PM on October 15, 2009


This will destroy the hopes and dreams of future generations. And they will all blame you.

Sleep well my friend.
posted by blue_beetle at 5:37 PM on October 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


Future generations deserve all the grief they get, for messing about with our LHC.
posted by pompomtom at 5:58 PM on October 15, 2009 [3 favorites]


Oh.

Oh dear. You say, "back to normal," pb, and I thank you for managing to save the comment history, but I am not comforted. You see, the residual effects of emergency excerptation are entirely uncharacterized.

I believe we should be wary of composing output with mefi-spousii until we're all tested for stacked tags in our source code. I really don't think any of us want to risk the malformatting and stigma resulting from an improperly parsed abridgment.
posted by zennie at 6:26 PM on October 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


Will this be a problem for future generations of MeFites?

Picture if you will an archaeologist, thousands of years in the future, carefully unearthing an ancient technological artifact, when suddenly... your unmatched <i> tag leaps out of the remains of the old server and latches onto his face. He staggers backwards, screaming, "Get it off me! Get it off me!"
posted by FishBike at 6:35 PM on October 15, 2009 [4 favorites]


FishBike, that made me think of Jack Handey.

“Anytime I see something screech across a room and latch onto someone's neck, and the guy screams and tries to get it off, I have to laugh, because what is that thing.”
posted by gursky at 7:28 PM on October 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


Picture if you will an archaeologist, thousands of years in the future, carefully unearthing an ancient technological artifact, when suddenly... your unmatched <i> tag leaps out of the remains of the old server and latches onto his face. He staggers backwards, screaming, "Get it off me! Get it off me!"

...and then we gasp in horror as under its malign influence he begins slowly and inexorably tilting to the right....
posted by nebulawindphone at 10:00 PM on October 15, 2009 [1 favorite]


I was admiring some truly superlative stacked italics the other day, thinking I'd hit it, but then what do you think happened but a strikeout.
posted by BrotherCaine at 10:48 PM on October 15, 2009


Always close your i tags.

Absolutely goddamn right.

Unless you're going all the way.
posted by xorry at 6:01 AM on October 16, 2009 [1 favorite]


This happened to me a long while back, when I used a huge string of small-tags, which I didn't close. My commenting history ended up looking so tiny that it approached the importance of the words.
posted by not_on_display at 10:51 AM on October 16, 2009 [1 favorite]


"a failure of the excerpting code to proper close the tags left open by the abridgment of the comment for the commenting history page—maybe the parser closed the one i tag and called it good, not expecting them to be strictly (and pointlessly) stacked like that"

Last time that happened to me, it ruined my sex life for 2.3 years.... be careful!
posted by HuronBob at 6:16 PM on October 16, 2009


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