Proof-reading note

[nancylebov]

In my previous post, there was a gratuitous </a>. I've gotten it to appear at both dw and lj by using [& # 6 0] and [& # 6 2], without the spaces.

Something at dreamwidth very kindly suppressed it in my post there (no doubt related to the same helpful thing which turns [& # 6 0] without the spaces into <), but it appeared in my cross-post to livejournal.

Trying to find out how to just mention [& # 6 0] turns up [& l t], which would be easier to remember, but the problem seems to be that asking about escape codes just turns up information about escape codes rather than how to tell html how to *not* let the escape code make the character.

I suppose this is evidence that google isn't close to sentience yet.

ETA: I had two reasons for posting this-- a hint for people who cross-post and care about such things to proof read at all the sites your post is showing up at, and (as the post evolved) a request for how to post escape codes without letting them escape.

As for google's sentience, I'm assuming it would go through a stage of not being clever enough to dissemble by giving bad search results.

Comments

[lethargic_man]

By default, HTML ignores extraneous tags like this; the fact it appears is LJ trying to be helpful, by assuming anything which is not a matched tag is intended as literal use of less than and greater than characters, which is generally the case when someone not web-savvy tries to use something involving them. So it's not DW kindly suppressing the characters, it's LJ trying to be helpful and, in this instance, failing.

[madfilkentist]

The way to avoid escape codes is by meta-escaping, so to speak.

The ampersand character (&) will introduce an escape sequence. However, the escape sequence which represents an ampersand won't. That escape sequence is &amp; . To type it, I had to enter "&amp;amp;".

Now let me preview that to see if I got that all right...

[nancylebov]

Thanks.

[thnidu]

You also need to end the sequence with a semicolon. So the first of these should produce a less-than sign, but the second should just appear as itself:

< (that's &lt; )
< (and that's just &lt )

Well, WTF? This is different from what I ever thought I knew about HTML. madfilkentist, have they loosened the rules, or was it always this loose?