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or the nth time just now, I used the 'less than' symbol to mean 'less than', not as the start of some HTML. The preview shows < as < but in the posted comment, it is treated as HTML and just screws up the post. Preview here also shows < as < The < in this post so far have been entered as & l t ; but here is a sample: 15 days <18 days and using the dread symbol itself 15 days <18 days Let's see what we get. I just noticed that on the preview page here, all the & l t ; in the Description: box were changed to <
posted by hexatron on Apr 19, 2008 - 48 comments

I've come across a few issues in my latest AskMefi post related to rendering. [more inside]
posted by PuGZ on Oct 19, 2007 - 12 comments

I found this previous MeTa post, which states why numeric html entities are not allowed. However, there seem to be no named entities for the musical notes. How did this happen then?
posted by Caviar on May 25, 2007 - 34 comments

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 on Sep 21, 2006 - 32 comments

eponymous blargh registered himself a sock puppet using html entities which looks exactly like my username. thank you.
posted by quonsar on Jul 17, 2005 - 19 comments

HTML entities, like Π or Σ get converted in the input area to the actual displayed characters after a preview.

So when the comment is posted, the displayed characters -- not the entities -- are actually submitted, and the submitted displayed characters are then converted to question marks in the posted comment.

The result is that a preview that looked fine turns into a comment that doesn't.

Also: using the

 tag (say to preserve original whitespace) results in double-spaced lines, taking up too much vertical space. Using the  tag prevents this, but whitespace is not preserved. Adding   appears to be a (n ugly and hard to edit) work-around, but while leading non-breaking spaces within  tags are retained in previews, they are stripped in the posted comment.



As a number of askMefi's ask for program code, and as even some FPPs may contain code fragments, this makes the code unreadable or even syntactically incorrect in languages than foolishly assign meaning to whitespace.



And it's a pure pain to spend the time to carefully add the whitespace and to Google the correct HTML entities for a post, only to see them stripped out.



(Browser: Firefox 1.0.3)

posted by orthogonality on Apr 27, 2005 - 70 comments

I “think” spéciàl chàràctérs shöuld wörk nöw, thöugh it's pröbably töö éàrly tö sày the böxés and quéstiön marks will be göné. That'll be £5 or 1000¥ or €3.5.
posted by mathowie on Oct 8, 2002 - 55 comments

I was gonna post a link in MeFi and wanted to have my post contain a few chinese characters. . .believe me this would have been a laugh riot. I pasted in some Chinese and they came out as question marks on the preview so I decided that it would not have been THAT funny after all.

Is there something intrinsic in the MeFi servers that prevent non-English characters, or do I just need to try harder?
posted by Danf on Apr 25, 2002 - 11 comments