I don't think we should outlaw table tags.

The problems that have been caused have all been genuine errors, and the people who made them have presumably been informed, and learned from their mistake?

But in each case, wasn't it a typo rather than an error? I mean, people know what to do, they just mis-type sometimes. If that mis-typing is going to cause a huge problem, we're better off doing something about it, I think.

Mine was pasting part of something tabley into the board, which got confused by the missing parts.

Three of John H's tables are 10-cell tables like the one in John H "Natter 3: My Life and Times of Me, as Seen by Me" Oct 27, 2002 12:23:29 am EDT. So he won't miss those, except in a techy way.

For the record, there are 23 posts that use a table tag -- half of those are mine, the rest posted by Jess, Jon, John, billytea and Dani.

The times I used a table, I could have easily done without.

It is an error, but it's one that breaks a page -- not makes it look incorrectly formatted. Throw in an early t /table or two for instance, and you can rework the entire page layout.

My tables definitely needed to be tables, but didn't necessarily need to be posted period.

I like table tags. I would miss them.

Wouldn't table tags be easier to fix than the font formatting ones, anyway? Since you can't overlap them without table breakage? It seems like it would be easier to figure out if they're nested improperly, since they have to work in order.

Well, in theory tables are very easy in that t /table closes any open t tr and any t /table or t /tr closes an open t td

However, we'd have to go in both directions, because t /table all by itself (as in someone typed in t tableborder=0 just whacks a page. That bothers me to no end.

Again though it seems there are ways to spot these errors. It is fixing errors that runs into problems. So don't fix errors. Spot errors , and than put the user back in the form with an error mesage. Simplfies your job, and puts repair onus where it belongs - on the user.

I wish it were as easy as just "spot errors". HTML is a complicated language, with many flavours and variations.

Any Perl guru worth his salt (insert encryption gag here) will tell you that you need to use an HTML-parsing module in order to do the subject justice, and there's no such thing in PHP.

For me, the central issue is the unfixability of that Betsy error from before. That's a big-ass problem. You could click on edit, but you couldn't use the edit form that appeared, right?

Can I log in to the test site to figure out why? Or wouldn't that help?

I repeat the idea of a "safe mode edit" for admins only, in which, prior to the post appearing for edit, every < and > get replaced with [[[ and ]]], any arbitrary marker*, so that rather than trying to fix Betsy's broken <a whatever> code, we're fixing her [[[a whatever]]] code, which by definition, can't break any page it appears on.

Then you'd re-save, and re-replace.

* only not bloody percentage signs -- I loathe the use of %% as a code marker since spending many hours under the hood of WX...

Jon's fixed the editability thing -- he's moved the FORM tag.