A Markup Thread

Discussion in 'Computer Science & Culture' started by Tiassa, Dec 4, 2014.

  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,884
    HTML Deprecation and Obsolescence

    I'm not especially worried about whispers over the years that HTML will become wholly obsolete, and when you blog you only really use content-related tags such as a, p, and the various text decorations.

    And even now I'm not worried about the suggestion that the plethora of advice to dump b, i, and u in favor of strong, em, and span were apparently all wrong (according to Mozilla, so, you know, whatever). Indeed, it has been in the last month or so that I've finally started reversing my usual typos; that is, for years if I let my attention slip I would switch to UBB tags instead of HTML. That habit finally flipped, and I had to correct myself here at Sciforums, where I slipped and used HTML instead of UBB.

    Big effin' deal. I'm not a web designer. I should probably learn CSS just because, but for now, since my style sheets are provided by other software, all I really need to know is how to make the words look approximately right on the page°.

    Oh, right. I digress.

    Every once in a while, in the professional web world, a detail gets missed, and we learn a little something about how other websites customize their markup. WordPress uses (blockquote), which works well enough for Google (Blogspot/Blogger); it turns out HuffPo uses (q1) or something like that; in truth, I don't bother with the "blockquote" or "cite" tags, instead styling "margin-left:50px; font-family:arial, sans serif; font-size:90%;". The difference is enormous.

    But tonight it was Amazon. Or Facebook. Whatever. The general problem should be apparent:

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    I do, in fact, recognize "h2" from somewhere, but it's not a tag I use.

    So after all this preface: Did that display incorrectly because of deprecation and obsolescence resulting in a particular incompatibility between Amazon's markup and Facebook's? Or did somebody just forget to close a tag?

    And no, I did not rush out to buy a bacon cookbook. Rather, this is just one of those things that comes 'round because, well, this is apparently the kind of shit some people prefer to post on Facebook. You know, like sharebait, some people just can't stop advertising for companies that can afford their own damn advertising.

    (I actually blocked a feed today because these people won't stop posting those "[inspirational saying about my parent/child/sibling] share if you agree" things.)

    But yeah, for all the extraneous ranting and self-indulgence, there is actually a question: So, yeah, what did actually happen there? What got lost in translation?

    ____________________

    Notes:

    ° Then again, if I ever want to get rid of the mandatory double-space between paragraphs in favor of traditional, indented paragraphs, yes, I will need CSS. And let me note here that while it is true that language and communication evolve, it used to be that such evolution was progressive and expansive, that a language changed to accommodate new information; I loathe the twenty-first century regressive evolution in which we are changing the presentation of our language in order to simplify and thereby reduce costs for the private sector. No, really. It's why we're changing the nature of the ellipsis; there is no four-dot ellipsis as we use it in the English language in the charset, so "...." translates to "…." It is interesting watching professional writers work around this on web sites; I cannot possibly be the first person to come up with the idea of "(em).(/em).(em).(/em).", which renders well enough. Oh, and I fucking hate smartquotes.
     
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  3. Varda The Bug Lady Valued Senior Member

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    I think it's more likely that someone deployed a file with some funky hidden characters in it which broke the tags than an issue with deprecation. Amazon probably rolls little updates in all the time. Shit happens

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  5. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    Code:
    <H2>
    is one of the Header markups (H1 to H6). It's still in use on normal websites, in fact some search engines use headers (especially H1) to identify varying content in websites.
    As Varda mentioned however the muck up was probably just an unparsed code.

    Some CMS software will not parse HTML markup unless the privileges of the user is the administrator due to security concerns (It's apart of a Sanitization process), so it's possible that the person that added the advert didn't have the right privileges. It would of make more sense if the advert had been stored in something similar to an XML format and then parsed by a script to make sure accidents like that didn't happen, however there would still need to be a check done after the parse occurred to make sure it came out correctly.

    The next problem however is such systems as Cloudflare, as if they cache the template in the corrupted format, it can be a while for the fixed format to appear since the entire cloud system is corrupted with the wrong copy.
     
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