I have to fix this several times a week…please read and heed. I’m hoping that if I announce this as a post, it will reduce the problem.
No wordpress.com can’t fix this issue with comments, I’ve asked.
PLEASE be careful when trying to bold, italicize, link, or blockquote in comments. Just one transposed character is all it takes. Also, there’s no need to try to hyperlink URL’s, WordPress will automatically hyperlink any URL you type in like this:
OK, please note this, then burn it into your mind, slash BEFORE, not after. Thanks for your consideration – Anthony
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Strikeone?As a web developer, I find WordPress’ assertion that they can’t do anything mildly ridiculous. They could implement any number of solutions to stop this happening, at no discernible expense to loading times or processing power. Poor.
I think that I get it…
maybe not…Add a preview to the commenting as so many other forums have and an option to edit your post if you made an error. Set time to edit 20-30 min.
No matter how well aquinted you are with typing or html, your fingers don’t always find the right keys. Mistakes do happen and here (in this forum) you have no option to correct it. Only mods have that option, and you have chosen that yourself.
I use html everyday, and I still make typing errors.
Notepad++ was the text editor of choice for me using Windows. Now it’s Smultron.
(same, same but different) I always “code” my html using that.
Rattus,
“You are completely wrong. HTML does have valid self closing tags, button, input, hr, br are a few of them.”
HTML doesn’t have self-closing tags, what it has is empty elements that don’t have end tags. They don’t need closing because nothing has been opened. If you tried to close them yourself, it would be invalid HTML.
HTML has elements, some self-contained in a single tag, some with content surrounded by opening and closing tags. XHTML is supposed to be valid XML which tries to handle all tags generically according to the same syntax. All tags come in pairs; an opening tag and a closing tag. The idea of a self-closing tag only makes sense in XHTML where all tags have to be opened/closed.
One thing I did find interesting about this was the fact that because WP publish their code, it’s possible for other people to figure out exactly where and why it goes wrong. The other part of the process – them acknowledging the problem and fixing it – is still missing. But open code does have it’s plus points.
The moderators that remain at the overheated blog now try to inject closing tags to prevent the spent comment from overbolding…
[very good! ~jove, mod]
Skip says:March 19, 2011 at 9:59 pm
Maybe overly simplistic but why not just switch your commenting engine to IntenseDebate or Disqus instead of the WP default?
Please no! Anthony, do NOT switch to Disqus. It’s one huge pain in the butt and terrible for reading – especially when trying to catch up (you have to read the entire thread again so as to catch nested responses!)
Putting the closing slash first is actually incorrect – it’s one of those “improvements” brought to us by our friends at MS and became the standard at WP because WP is windows heritage software.
As far as I know there’s no good solution to this. The usual council of despair, changing to a better publishing package, won’t fix the problem because so many people use windows apps to write and pre-format their text and/or comments – and those apps will insert incorrect mark-up into their output.
One option to consider, if you run on a unix server (e.g. Linux) is to create a script that runs through the comments tables cleaning them up; then have cron automate running that once every couple of hours. There are minor idiosyncracies to this, but you probably know someone who can not just do this, but -and much more importantly- babysit the thing for you afterward.
My PHP foo is less than it could be, but it looks like the str_replace function if placed in a new function in your functions.php file would do it for you.
Something along these lines:
add_filter( ‘the_content’, ‘close_tags’, 25 );
function close_tags( $content ) {
return str_replace( ‘i/’, ‘/i’, $content );
}
Any PHP wizards here that could help? I’m sure the above is not 100% correct (namely the content variable I expect needs to be the post variable).
This is one of the reasons I don’t link, unless automatically. Another is that I would prefer to make the argument myself and suggest that others look for confirmation or refutation. Yet a third is that links deteriorate and then there goes your argument.
=================
Richard Holle @ur momisugly 8:06 PM
Your comment suggests an experiment. Test the rankings at each search engine before and after adding those key words. There must be some reason this fairly simple experiment is inadequate, else it would have been done already.
Go, go grantwriters.
======
JoNova,has a very nice comment box set up.
It was set up by a computer expert Steve LeMaster,who was the Founder of Global Warmig Skeptics blog/forum,that I now own.
I get the impression that the real problem is that WordPress.com does not allow a fully developed comment box as seen at JoNova.Jo does not use WordPress server.Thus is able to have the nice row of html tags to use that are preset.
Go see what I mean in this link:
http://joannenova.com.au/2011/03/yes-it-is-about-the-science/#comments
Scroll to the bottom of the page and see it.
“Any PHP wizards here that could help?”
I don’t claim to be one, but I thought it might go a bit like the plugin text below. (It’s a million to one shot, but it might just work.) However, I make no claims for the safety or correctness of this. I’ve got no way to test it.
<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Filter malformed tags
Plugin URI:
Description: Replace mistyped i/, b/ and a/ tags in comments
Version: 1.0
Author: Nullius in Verba
Author URI:
License: Lesser GPL
*/
add_filter(‘comment_text’,’filter_malformed_tags’);
function filter_malformed_tags($content) {
$bad_tags = array(‘<i/>’,'<b/>’,'<a/>’);
$good_tags = array(‘</i>’,'</b>’,'</a>’);
$content=str_ireplace($bad_tags,$good_tags,$content);
return $content;
}
?>
Hopefully that won’t mess up the page too badly. Apologies to moderators in advance if it does.
Looks like you nailed it Nullius in Verba 🙂
The last time I tried to use the “Test” page (and again just now), there was no “Leave a Reply” section at the bottom of the comments. How do we test comments there?
REPLY: You must not be living right, it is there now 😉
What happens is that WP.com auto closes comments after 30 days, I have to keep reopening – A
Nullius,
Looks like crossed wires in our communication. I was using “tag” as a synonym for “element” and this led to the incorrect conclusion. It does appear you are correct.
PaulMurphy,
The ending / followed by the tag name is the standard for HTML closing tags and has been since at least 1997 in HTML 3.2 (this is the earliest spec I could find at w3c.org).
The WordPress dashboard has a checkbox “Settings – Writing – WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” that closes unclosed tags in comments, and the setting is available to WordPress.com users who cannot use custom plugins.
WordPress.org users can use a custom plugin to do it more neatly in some special cases, but even then the built-in setting is a useful fallback for those cases that the plugin misses.
I used to experiment. I’m sure I’m guilty. I won’t try HTML things from now on – and learn by doing. I’ll try to really understand first, not guess. No more, “let’s see if this works”
My apologies, Moderators
Sincere apologies, Anthony. As someone who frequently notices
speelingspelling mistakes on newspaper websites – Telegraph take note – I can understand the annoyance.Sorry A, it isn’t my fault. I think the people of Belgium changed the formula for Anheuser-Busch products. I never had this problem in the nineties!
“Looks like you nailed it Nullius in Verba :)”
Hardly. The plugin shows how trivial it would be to do, but there’s a big difference between WordPress.org, the free host-your-own blogging software, and WordPress.com, the hosting service. Plugins are only allowed on the former, at your own risk. Anthony can’t change any of the code or add plugins, preview tools, or edit controls because WordPress.com won’t allow it. Their buggy software messes up comment handling, and there’s no way he can fix it.
The only solution is for commenters to not mess up their tags.
I’m sure WordPress know perfectly well how to fix it, but apparently they’re not going to. WordPress.com do say that if you want particular features then you can write and request them, and the most popular may be implemented one day if they happen to feel like it, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
For a long time, posters on Free Republic had a great time doing fancy stuff with HTML in their posts. Sometimes, someone would forget to close a tag, and everything following would be affected.
It got to the point where some folks had an automatic string in their posts which consisted of five or ten of the closing tags for each of the more common HTML tags people were using.
This doesn’t seem to be a major theme on Free Republic these days, but I didn’t catch anything happening to address it.
Anyway, to everyone who may be confused, common HTML tags are listed below the comment window. To close a tag, you slash it. = “slash italics”. If you have the slash anywhere else, you’re not slashing the right target.
Oh, all right. </i> = “slash italics”. <i/> is slashing something else.
Here we are with powerful computers and flimsy software. Unless the HTML is really botched, it shouldn’t that difficult to write subroutines to find and fix open tags, or even sense what we’re trying to do, and auto-complete for us. For italics, long sequences in italic should be disallowed by the software. Alas…
At the bottom of the JoNova page it says, “Powered by WordPress.”
Maybe she uses a paid version and not the free one that Anthony uses. The Comment box with the select-and-click formatting and a Preview function would be a big improvement here.
/Mr Lynn