table tags ignored July 18, 2002 7:26 AM   Subscribe

when posting a comment, tags get ignored. are we not allowed to use them or is this a bug?
posted by mlang to Bugs at 7:26 AM (13 comments total)

i swear, being able to use a table was essential for my comment to present its information in the most useful possible form (and not some sort of vanity positioning thing). i'll just hold off on posting it until i know what's up. thanks!
posted by mlang at 7:28 AM on July 18, 2002


shit... 'tags' do get ignored! on preview, the initial post above read 'when posting a comment,
 tags
get ignored'.
posted by mlang at 7:30 AM on July 18, 2002


and another one!
posted by mlang at 7:31 AM on July 18, 2002


what i'm trying to say is:

'table' tags get ignored.

but i've also discovered, while posting this thread, that 'pre' tags also get ignored (or, more accurately, treated really bizarrely) and that the 'greater than' and 'less than' symbols translate correctly from their character codes on preview, only to disappear on post.
posted by mlang at 7:34 AM on July 18, 2002


administrator!! please hope me!
posted by mlang at 7:36 AM on July 18, 2002


<em>
<strong>
<i>
<b>
#<sup>
<cite>

Span, div, etc are ignored and class is stripped out and style appears to be ignored.
posted by riffola at 7:44 AM on July 18, 2002


<!-- well, i guess the brackets work when posting a comment, just not when posting a thread? -->
posted by mlang at 8:11 AM on July 18, 2002


the thread page on metatalk is fucked up, so forget that for a second here.

I've removed table as well as a bunch of other tags to prevent their nefarious use. One of the first attempted hacks of metafilter was a guy submitting 100 nested tables as a comment, so it would crash browsers. I can't recall ever seeing a good use of them, so they are out. As well as things like script, link, and attributes such as style and class. These are all done because they are dangerous tags that allow people to do stuff like change the look of the webpage and make it unreadable for others.

They're too risky to allow, so I'm not going to budge on this one. If a tag is stripped from your comment or post, try a workaround.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:59 AM on July 18, 2002


I assume you've disabled the script tag in the freeform user profile section for the same reason, sir?
posted by Danelope at 10:11 AM on July 18, 2002


yeah, though for some reason I wasn't running the tag stripper on user bios until today.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:43 AM on July 18, 2002


and attributes such as style and class

No wonder everyone's been so bitchy lately.
posted by LionIndex at 10:51 AM on July 18, 2002


understood. thanks for the quick response.
posted by mlang at 10:54 AM on July 18, 2002


yeah, though for some reason I wasn't running the tag stripper on user bios until today.

Hmm. A few weeks ago, I was attempting to write a little PHP script (on my server) that would allow users to change the caption on my user page. I had planned to include the text via a script tag whose source would reside on my server, but the angled brackets surrounding the word 'script' were automatically transposed into their ASCII equivalents to prevent it from functioning.

Does this mean I'll lose all of the formatting on my userpage the next time I save it? *grin*
posted by Danelope at 11:44 AM on July 18, 2002


« Older Minor bug in "My Comments" sorting   |   MetaTalk category list is broken Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments