Live Preview feature is broken for Ask MetaFilter. January 27, 2011 10:23 AM   Subscribe

Live Preview feature is broken for Ask MetaFilter.

When replying to to questions an ask, there is handy little "Live Preview" box the displays all your rendered HTML for you, and which I generally like a lot.

However, if you want to type the left angle bracket, i.e., the "less than" symbol, it does not render correctly.

Presume you'd like to say "Available for less than five hundred dollars", but you type it like this:

"Available for < $500"

This shows up correctly in the preview, but when submitted, it truncates the line after the bracket, and adds a closing bracket, presumably in some effort to parse it as HTML, and you end up with:

"Available for <>"

Which is really not what you were trying to say nor what was displayed in the Live Preview box.

Note that in this post I have specifically used HTML entities instead of actually typing the angle bracket characters to avoid the problem.

You can see an example of what happens with this in this topic.
posted by tylerkaraszewski to Bugs at 10:23 AM (12 comments total)

Sure enough. Typing this (without surrounding it with <pre> and </pre>):
Testing adding a < to show less than.
Now testing with ampersand-lt-semicolon: <
Yields this:

Testing adding a <> Now testing with ampersand-lt-semicolon: <

If you click preview (instead of using the live preview) it'll transform it into "&lt;", just to make things more confusing.
posted by Lexica at 10:29 AM on January 27, 2011


Yeah, I can duplicate it too. If your entire comment is on one line, you're fine. But if you have a break somewhere the auto-inserted <br> tags throw things off. We'll get it fixed up.
posted by pb (staff) at 10:32 AM on January 27, 2011


I fixed up the borked AskMe comments.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:32 AM on January 27, 2011


bork bork bork
posted by deborah at 12:30 PM on January 27, 2011 [4 favorites]


Why doesn't Jessamyn's gold star appear on her profile page?
posted by Confess, Fletch at 1:01 PM on January 27, 2011


It's a MeTa-only gold star and it's going away in a few days anyhow.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:15 PM on January 27, 2011


Is the purpose of it to be an "I'M SPEAKING AS A MOD IN THIS POST" marker?
posted by Pope Guilty at 1:29 PM on January 27, 2011


No, it's my five-year anniversary star.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:30 PM on January 27, 2011


It's a MeTa-only gold star and it's going away in a few days anyhow.

It's changing into a red heart for February, isn't it. And then a green clover for March, I get it.
posted by cashman at 1:40 PM on January 27, 2011 [2 favorites]


It's a MeTa-only gold star and it's going away in a few days anyhow.

Oh man. FWIW beyond the general awesomeness of jessamyn having the star, I actually have grown used to it as a Feature. Like, "hmmm interesting point meTa OP...ok shitload of rando user comments reiterating the same three or four points of view / descending into bickering and 'jokes'...what does jessamyn say about this..." and while scrolling the star jumps out. I actually wish all the mods had something, like...idk cortex could have some sort of minecraft hammer or whatever.
posted by jeb at 1:51 PM on January 27, 2011 [1 favorite]


I actually wish all the mods had something, like...idk cortex could have some sort of minecraft hammer or whatever.

While it's no minecraft hammer, the MeFi Navigator script adds a very visible "admin" box next to the mods' user names in MeTa.
.
posted by Dumsnill at 2:08 PM on January 27, 2011


It's changing into a red heart for February, isn't it. And then a green clover for March, I get it.

It'll be a pink heart.

Sadly, once the cycle gets beyond the purple horseshoe and red balloon, it's just disgusting oat bits for the rest of the year.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:58 PM on January 27, 2011 [2 favorites]


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