Jon's right, Rob, you've misinterpreted it a little -- see that "%3E" part?

That's the closing bracket of the tag, or rather the URL-encoded version of it, so that part is really

>try this

and the rest of the page is caught up in it. I don't know why it's got encoded or half-encoded or whatever.

I agree with Cindy that previewing is a good idea. At another site I use you're not allowed to post right away, you must preview at least once. You don't get much help, just "Doesn't look like you expected? Maybe you'd better read the HTML Tips" but still, it does help you find and correct mistakes.

But if we preview a very broken post, we'll be in the same place where we couldn't edit Betsy's post.

Previewing less broken posts could be good, but it also won't catch unclosed tags that happen at the end of the post.

So we'll still have to caveat heavily.

What do you think about some kind of "Safe Mode" means of editing, ita, like I mentioned a few posts back?

There must be some way in which we can put the bad code in a sandbox so it stops being part of the page, like replacing the HTML brackets with [[[tag]]] or something?

Having to go into the database by hand is a bit scary. You're the only person who can do that, right?

Ummm... guys.... I messed up. All those URL-encoded entities were added by Mozilla when I downloaded the page to my HD. Here's what the page really looks like.

I blame the tequilla.

OK thinking about ways of checking for problematic HTML.

I've got two methods I've played with (in Perl).

1. every time we find an opening tag, we push it onto an array; every time we find a closing tag, if it's the closing tag which matches the last item of the array, we remove the last item of the array; a good result is an empty array, but if it's not empty, we add closing tags, in reverse order of course, to the post.
2. every time we find an opening tag, we increment the number of that tag in a hash, so we have %hash{number_of_open_a_tags} = x; every time we find a closing tag we decrement that number; a good result is all tags at zero; but if they're not zero, we need that many closing tags added to the post

Problems with A: it won't work correctly with crossed tags, like this:

<b> something in bold <i> something in bold and italic </b> no longer bold, but still italic </i>

it'll get out of step, but the HTML, despite being Very Bad In Principle, won't actually be problematic for the page as a whole.

Problems with B: no maintaining of order, because it's a hash.

If you looked at the page a few minutes ago, I just resaved it while logged in as an admin. I realized that the "edit" link wasn't showing up because I hadn't written the post. Anyway, now the edit link is showing up, and it works! So I don't know why ita couldn't edit the post originally. The mystery deepens!

OK my analysis of that bad link is this:

<a href='http://story.news.yahoo.com/ news?tmpl=story2&cid=300&e=17&u=/ibsys/20021108/lo_wisc/1382225">Try this.</a></p><hr align="LEFT" size="2" width="75%" noshade><p class='normal-text'>

It's an opening A tag:

<a

then a very long, busted attribute:

href='http://story.news.yahoo.com/ news?tmpl=story2&cid=300&e=17&u=/ibsys/20021108/lo_wisc/1382225">Try this.</a></p><hr align="LEFT" size="2" width="75%" noshade><p class='

then an unknown attribute (as the browser sees it)

normal-text'

and then finally the closing bracket:

>

(unless it's a mandatory part of the post message function)

Whatever the solution t clueless , please don't let it be this.

OK a possible solution: check for bad HTML. Don't try to correct. If the HTML is bad simply refuse to post, and give the user an error message. You catch, put the burden on the user to fix it.

This could be unclosed tags, unclose quotes of various types, and too many quotes of the same type in an < A Href > tag.

For me, the fact that "post message" takes you back to the thread serves as the preview function. I narcissistically reread all my posts, and don't have broken HTML for longer than it takes me to edit.