HTML allowed in band names?

Post by **Lunkhead** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 5:04 pm

Um, what's up with "X0" this week? Are you really going to allow HTML in band names? That seems like opening a big can of worms...

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 6:00 pm

Lunkhead wrote:Um, what's up with "X0" this week? Are you really going to allow HTML in band names? That seems like opening a big can of worms...

Oddly, it has caused no problems (on this end) so far. If it does, I plan to change it to X0 for archiving purposes.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 6:53 pm

You'd better check the voting system and podcast to sure it handles it fine. I remember So<kpupp3t and <3 always causing it trouble.

Also, if you would just do everything in UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 you could just use the appropriate Unicode character for the subscript.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 7:52 pm

Well, I guess I'm changing my band name to "<h1><blink>Lunkhead</blink></h1>", then.

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:22 pm

fluffy wrote:You'd better check the voting system and podcast to sure it handles it fine. I remember So<kpupp3t and <3 always causing it trouble.

Also, if you would just do everything in UTF-8 instead of ISO-8859-1 you could just use the appropriate Unicode character for the subscript.

As far as the voting system and the podcast, they both seem to be just fine with it. As far as your second paragraph goes, although I know what you are talking about, I have no idea how one goes about implementing. I am not consciously choosing either, I am just typing, man. Where's the option?

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:38 pm

You need to do two things:

1) Ensure that the pages include UTF-8 content. This requires a bit of coordination between your text editor, email client, and a few other things. Most stuff knows to speak UTF-8 now, on the plus side, but on the minus side, a lot of things don't know what they're speaking and they thusly assume it's ISO-8859-1. (Encodings are hard.)

2) serve up pages using the UTF-8 character encoding. This can be done by having the following as the very very first line of every PHP script (before ANYTHING is emitted):

Code: Select all

<? header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8"); ?>

or, if you can't do that for some reason, have this in your HTML <head> section:

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<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

As long as your web admin interface has all that stuff on it, then 1) should probably work out as-is.

If there's any existing ISO-8859-1 crap in the archive (which there probably is thanks to Sven Mullet and the other umlaut-adding jerkwads back when that was popular) it's pretty easy to convert a file to UTF-8 as a one-time thing.

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:40 pm

OK, I was too flip there. Let's discuss this briefly.

It's easy to declare UTF-8, right? You just include a meta-tag along the lines of

Code: Select all

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>

btw, I figured this out before reading your post above - we were typing at the same time.

The trick is how to make sure that the file really is UTF-8 compliant. Apparently, there is a problem saving Windows Notepad (my editor of choice) as UTF-8 because it prefixes the file contents with a Byte Order Mark [BOM]. This can cause problems, so it is suggested that one uses other editors.

And the other editor (that I use for WYSIWYG prototyping) doesn't know anything about UTF-8, so I would have to abandon that as well. Dreamweaver comes highly recommended for this purpose. Also Apple's TextEdit is very good at saving UTF-8.

Another question is how do you type them? is pretty universal. I only have to remember one tag for all subscripts. But if I want to use UTF-8, each character has it's own code. And I have to type it. 0, for example, is E28280, while 1 is E28281, etc. Man, is looking good, and it's easy to remember. I didn't even have to look it up having not used it for several years. I would have to look up E28280 EVERY TIME.

So, in order to solve a problem that I don't even perceive, given that the subscripts work on the front page, in the voting, in the podcast, and every where else I can think of, you would have me making websites with Dreamweaver or switching to a Mac and looking stuff like E28280 up and typing it just out of abundance of caution?

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 10:52 pm

The thing is that 0 doesn't work in podcast metadata. At best it gets stripped out, at worst it causes problems with various clients, but at the most likely you end up with something where the artist name is "X0" instead of X₀. HTML markup is a decent formatting mechanism, but not everything speaks HTML (for example, id3 tags), and Unicode provides a somewhat more general solution of representing common symbols in a concrete way.

Anyway, as far as actually typing stuff in, most Unicode-aware operating systems have a "character palette" application, and on Windows, if you know the Unicode code point, you hold Alt and press the four-digit Unicode character (2080 in this case). Or you can just do what I do and Google "unicode subscript 0" and then copy-paste the character over.

The easiest thing to do is to just not let any non-7-bit characters in, though.

Basically, text is hard.

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:02 pm

fluffy wrote:The thing is that 0 doesn't work in podcast metadata.

Firefox's RSS reader has no problem with it. It even displays properly, as a subscript. iTunes on the other hand, just ignores the in the description and you end up with X0. The band name, on the other hand, shows the html. I got no problem with that, inconsistent as it may be. I am not gonna fret that iTunes can't figure it out.

SPUD

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:05 pm

fluffy wrote:The easiest thing to do is to just not let any non-7-bit characters in, though.

The guy asked nice:

"Although the file name and email subject don't allow it, I humbly request that the zero be written on the site as a subscript, X0 not because I am egotistical, but just because it's X-naught rather than X-zero."

My heart melted. I couldn't resist. You know how it is. Doesn't mean I have to let Lunkhead go crazy...

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:14 pm

I see it IS a little odd over in Lunkhead's (unofficial) Jukebox. Hey, this is how I keep him on his toes.

SPUD

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:17 pm

Well, okay, as long as you're happy with it.

Post by **Spud** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:18 pm

What? Are you getting old? You used to be able to go all night...

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:44 pm

I have no horse in this race.

Post by **Lunkhead** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 12:03 am

Not to be a smart ass, but I feel like the next thing I know someone will have an image in their band name, or maybe have a line break after every letter in their name ("L U N K H E A D"). I just think, like I said, you're opening up a can of worms by allowing any HTML in band names, especially when the rationale seems to be "because he asked nicely". But that's just my two cents...

Post by **Spud** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 12:11 am

Lunkhead wrote:Not to be a smart ass, but I feel like the next thing I know someone will have an image in their band name, or maybe have a line break after every letter in their name ("L U N K H E A D"). I just think, like I said, you're opening up a can of worms by allowing any HTML in band names, especially when the rationale seems to be "because he asked nicely". But that's just my two cents...

Look, I have already said I may change it back in the archive. I probably will, because it is bound to break something at some point. I do not feel that this one indulgence has created any obligation to allow people to have images or line breaks in their band names. On the other hand, there's nothing that says you can't ask. Nicely.

Eric Y. · Post by **Eric Y.** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 6:47 am

Lunkhead wrote:you're opening up a can of worms by allowing any HTML in band names, especially when the rationale seems to be "because he asked nicely".

I think you're forgetting that the site is not run democratically. We are at the whims of "the mods", who may choose to allow or disallow anything they choose on the website THEY run.

joshmillard · Post by **joshmillard** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 8:18 am

Yeah, there is no worries here about precedent; the forum is not a federal court, the stakes are low, and Spud can be a softy on the short term without it having some horrid ramifications on the long term I figure.

Also, I've always thought the idea of worms in cans was a little weird. I've seen like tupperwares or styrofoams of worms fresh from the bait shop I guess, but canned? Like, canned canned? Does that happen? And how is "you're totally gonna be able to do a bunch of fishing now" a warning, anyway? Idioms are nuts. From now on my lyrics will all be literalist statements.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 8:28 am

Yeah, my main worry is just that this crap is already hard enough to keep working and interoperable WITHOUT doing anything cutesy like this. id3 tags suck, legacy text encoding sucks, HTML (kind of) sucks, and RSS is generic enough that while it can act as an HTML container, not every field (e.g. itunes:author) is intended to be, and so in this particular instance, it sucks.

And one-off hacks to mitigate suckiness also suck.

Post by **Spud** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:36 am

Everything sucks. Some stuff sucks more than others. I have still not been illuminated as to the harm actually done by this one specific bit of suckitude.

fluffy · Post by **fluffy** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:42 am

Right now it means that in some podcast subscription things, the title will show up as "X0" or "X" or will cause the podcast subscription thing to fail to download/tag entirely, or who knows what else. But like I said I don't really care that much. My own podcast thing shows it as "X0". Whatever.

Post by **Spud** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 10:36 am

Meh, I can't find an rss reader that it breaks. Sure, it doesn't always display properly - usually the html is just dropped (or displayed) - but I really haven't seen it break anything. Can anybody point me to a real-world example?

HTML allowed in band names?

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