Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/WeblogNoComment Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/WeblogNoComment?atomcommentsDWiki2007-01-30T05:01:40ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/web/WeblogNoComment.By Chris Siebenmann on /blog/web/WeblogNoCommenttag:CSpace:blog/web/WeblogNoComment:507aa7d95fd6e45c016b5f3ab1cd3801ff65315eChris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>What I suspect is going on with the scienceblogs comment form
is a textarea gotcha that is sufficiently tangled I've turned
it into a blog entry, <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/TextareaGotcha">TextareaGotcha</a>.</p>
<p>(The easy way to test if my theory is right is to try to preview
a comment that has something like '</textarea> <h1> BOO! </h1>'
and see if the BOO! comes out as a big headline.)</p>
</div>2007-01-30T05:01:40ZBy DanielMartin on /blog/web/WeblogNoCommenttag:CSpace:blog/web/WeblogNoComment:1993a28d2626de507038a02511fccfb99f4b652bDanielMartin<div class="wikitext"><p>The comment pages on <a href="http://scienceblogs.com">http://scienceblogs.com</a> have an especially annoying comment preview "feature": the comment text returned to you isn't escaped properly.</p>
<p>Let me explain: scienceblogs uses some variant of Moveable Type, and the comment stuff there uses limited html as its markup language. Specifically, <code>&lt;</code> is what you type if you want your comment to include <code><</code>. If you just type an unadorned <code><</code>, then that's interpreted as an unallowed html tag, and you lose all text until either an unadorned <code>></code> or the end of the line.</p>
<p>Anyway, if you have a comment which has <code>&lt;</code> in it, when you hit preview to see that the comment works properly you'll see that everything is fine except that in the text box below the preview (where you should have your comment text for further tweaking) all of your <code>&lt;</code>s have been turned into unadorned <code><</code>s. The effect of this is that if you hit preview and think that your comment is fine, hitting "post" at that point will post a mangled comment.</p>
<p>There is apparently some deep Moveable Type issue with the version in use at scienceblogs that doesn't understand how to properly escape ampersands when sending text back to the browser's textarea box. I suspect that someone was trying to be clever and flexible in accepting what people typed in, and did it clumsily.</p>
<p>This wouldn't be an issue on most blogs, but on a science-related blog site, problems with comments that use <code><</code> gets to be annoying.</p>
</div>2007-01-29T15:42:51ZFrom 71.141.225.199 on /blog/web/WeblogNoCommenttag:CSpace:blog/web/WeblogNoComment:05554def06202db04837a1b786110c5314aa9b5dFrom 71.141.225.199<div class="wikitext"><p>What I hate more, I think, are blog comment previews that do not look the same as the final result. The linespacing is different, some tags are stripped in the final, etc.</p>
<p><em>I have encountered more than one of these.</em> More than two, if I'm not mistaken.</p>
<p>At least if there's no preview you can just bail and use ASCII markup (i.e. <a href="https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/dwiki/DWiki">DWiki</a>-style markup that's not processed).</p>
<p>--nothings</p>
</div>2007-01-13T15:50:49Z