HTML formatting problems

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buzzard
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HTML formatting problems

Post by buzzard »

I've had to switch to using BBCode because I've been having problems with HTML documents getting cut off --all the text after an HTML tag disappears, although it's not clear which HTML tag. I don't have the exact details anymore but I'll go add another post after this one to demo it.

I also for some reason can't view source on any of the forum pages in my old browser--the page comes up blank--so I can't see whether the missing text is there and not rendering right, or is just getting thrown away by the HTML-processor.

Also, did you make the bbcode & tags for bold and italics do CSS stuff instead of using html bold and italics? I find it kind of creepy in a CSS-less browser to preview my posts and see no formatting despite having put some in. (And since I can't view source, I don't know whether it's because there's no formatting or whether it's because the formatting has been CSS-ified.)
buzzard
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Post by buzzard »

Bah, now I can't get it to happen, of course. (The post I made to Music, this was happening, but when I copied the source to that post back here and reverted the bbcode to HTML, it previewed fine. Grr.)
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Greg Stephens
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Post by Greg Stephens »

Keep an eye on it and let me know what you experience, if it happens again.

Here's how it works, just so you know:

The only regular HTML tags allowed are b,i,u,pre,a,img

If you use code, quote, strike, sub, sup and others, they just don't work (I could add those in, though, if anybody needed them). It's possible that some tag you used caused a problem and cut of the remainder of the post. This behavior is generally there in order to protect the forum from hackers who might type in Javascript instructions or other code in order to disrupt the HTML and cause the page to display information which should have been secure.

So if you use non-accepted HTML, then maybe there would be a problem.

Luckily, BBCode is similar to HTML with the exception of replacing < with [ symbols.

The way that BBCode works is that the databse stores it as BBCode, but when the post is parsed in order to be displayed, it is translated into regular HTML. However, I've just done a view source and it appears as if (in attempting to be cool, or whatever) the phpBB team has decided to translate the b tag into 'span style="font-weight: bold"' rather than simply 'b'. This, in my considered opinion, is jut plain wrong. It's a waste of bandwidth, makes the HTML markup a mess to read, and is poor use of CSS (in fact, it's not a stylesheet, merely an inline style application). Ugh. I'd never noticed that until you mentioned it. That's why an older browser, which doesn't understand CSS, won't display the formatting. Again, ugh.

*sigh* It may be time to look into updating to the lastest phpBB version and then hacking it again to make it better.

If you edit your post, you'll see the BBCode again because, as mentioned, that's how it's stored, even though it displays as HTML or styled HTML.
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buzzard
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Post by buzzard »

It's possible that the last time I typo'd an HTML tag which made it unrecognized and caused it to drop. I think the other time I ran into this a few days back, I might have been trying to get clever and used <strike> or some such.

I can certainly use BBCode, but there are some different things you have to learn--plus the existence of BBCode in the first place offends my sensibilities since it's totally redundant to HTML anyway.
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Greg Stephens
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Post by Greg Stephens »

Well, it's redundant to those who want and know how to use HTML, but the idea is that it allows standard formatting within forums and protects the forum from hacking attempts (to a certain degree- there are always ways to hack stuff).

Takes some getting used to- Even I will start using BBCode from time to time when I really mean to use HTML.
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buzzard
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Post by buzzard »

Ok, I couldn't get this post to work in the other forum, and it definitely says HTML is on, 'disable HTML in this post' is not checked. There is text after the <p> but it is getting truncated, at least in preview; let's see what happens when I post.

This is really belated, but I just noticed that one of the current losing titles is:
<blockquote>Mr. Dinky and Bo-Bo Head</blockquote><p>
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