I think a quickedit table (table, td, tr, th plus attributes of width and colour and alignment and stuff) would be more confusing. I'd lean towards disabling them completely, except no! I don't want to! I like and use them pretty often.

So I'm pretty torn.

To deal with things like the " ' mismatch, could you just keep track of how many double-quotes are withing the brackets, and if there isn't an even number, treat it as if it was an invalid tag and just ignore it? Or are there times where there should be an odd number of double-quotes?

ita, aren't your tables cut-and-pasted, so you could link to them? Or you could post at W/X and link. Don't know if anyone else uses tables. Tables are trouble. Remember how at Table Talk (hee) you could post pictures by making them the background of a table cell?

Could you disable tables (heh) for non-admins? Or are we getting way too complex here?

Nope. Most of my tables are assembled from other sources (either by hand, or from Excel) so there's not really any linkage.

Of course, if I'm the only one using them ... that's not a good enough reason to keep them.

Hil, and we'd also need to count the single quotes. Problem being, i think you can legally nest a single " inside ' ', and vice versa.

'"'

you can legally nest a single " inside ' ', and vice versa

Definitely, more than one. Though really, you should use the entities which are ' and " or whatever.

The really scary thing for an HTML parser?

The fact that it's legal to have a tag like this:

<img src="a-is-bigger-than-b.gif" alt="a > b">

I think I thought of something. When you've got an opening bracket, start scanning the rest of the post. You're looking for a quote of some sort or an opening or closing bracket. If you get to an opening bracket, that's an error. If you get to a quote, then just look for another of those quotes, and ignore everything else you come across until you find it. Then start looking for any quote or bracket again. If you find a closing bracket, you're done. If you get to the end of the post while you're still looking for anything, that's an error. If there's an error, bring up an edit page that just has the text box at the bottom, no post at the top, and tell the poster to fix it before posting. Would that work? (Does that even make any sense, or do I need to find some better way of explaining it?)

The edit link *did* work, Jon. It's that the edit form was broken by the bad HTML.

Ahhh, got it. I just tried to edit it and I see what you mean. The problem is that the opening FORM tag appears after the broken post. In this case, the FORM tag appeared before a second ' (single quote) which caused it to become a part of the messed-up "a href" tag.

There's an easy fix to make sure this particular mess doesn't happen again --- move the opening FORM tag so that it appears before the post. I just tried it and it worked great. Would you like me to put this revised version in test? None of my other mods use editpost.php so this would be completely independent of those.

Also, put me in the "we should disallow table tags" column. ita - like Noumenon said, you could always post your nifty table-ized statistics somewhere else and link to them.

Also, put me in the "we should disallow table tags" column.

But without table tags, there wouldn't be any columns...!