[thelist] Yahoo! like HTML textarea

aardvark roselli at earthlink.net
Mon Aug 6 13:36:26 CDT 2001


> From: ".jeff" <jeff at members.evolt.org>
> >
> > still the same problems (IE MSHTML), but different:
> >
> > http://www.amazon.com/tracking
> ><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> 
> are you referring to the source of the "content" area of the page
> above?

no.

i am a complete and utter baffoon.

i pasted in the wrong link... i was looking up my shipping date for 
my DVD order (Big Hit, Repo Man special edition, Fifth Element -- 
wanna trade?)...

anyway, the link i meant to post, before i paraded out my stupidity, 
was this one:

http://www.aspalliance.com/Yusuf/Article10.asp

> you're right, it is bad, but not unfixable.  when dealing with mass
> amounts of html it would pay to develop a parsing routine that would
> clean up the html.  it could do things like force all tags to
> lower-case, replace <b></b> with <strong></strong>,  remove any empty
> paragraphs, etc.  the tricky part would be removing the <font> tags
> and applying classes to parent elements. however, don't get me started
> on users pasting directly from word2k.  that's unbearably bad.

despite my bad post, your reply is spot-on...

but there are cases where running those routines on data going 
into a CMS can noticeably slow performance, and unless you 
account for everything, it can get pretty bad...

that's not to say i'm not exploring it...

plus, you want your code in the 'view HTML' mode in those tools to 
look like it does in the db, and if your doing a server-side 
conversion, it'll look different... similarly, if you pull clean code out 
of the db into the tool, the MSHTML engine eats it, so it looks like 
it never happened... this can be somewhat confusing for those 
users who are comfortable getting into the HTML...





More information about the thelist mailing list