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.

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

I very much like this idea. My change to the edit page will prevent another Betsy-mess from being editable, but who's to say another, different sort of uneditable post won't ever appear again?

The problem with the edit page was that it was reproducing the page-breaking post, right? So why not have a safe-edit page that just has the post as typed in the posting box at the bottom, without the actual post at the top?

We're flailing wildly with scope here.

I agree with the idea of an emergency edit page, but we of course have to choose a < substitute less like a hug.

I'm with John on the craziness of finding errors and presenting a useful error message to the hapless user. Dammit, man, can't you hack WX and gank us the code?

edit: Hil, that's Occammish in its brilliance.

Hil, that's Occammish in it's brilliance.

Damn. Give that girl a medal.

What they said.

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.

John, you might want to take a look at [link] -- but I can't vouch for the quality of the code.

Go, Hil. That version of emergency editing makes much sense.

About tables: I like them. Please don't take them away. Unless we can't work this out, which would be sad.

About presenting a useful error message to the hapless user:

The main point is containing the damage, right? And the parsing solutions we've looked at so far (lovely as they are) do not present the user with their intent, they merely prevent the user from breaking the page. Which is what we want, yes, not pretty but functional.

So why not go with the earlier suggestion that just kills the errant portion by replacing the < and > with something harmless, rather than trying to correctly close or correct it. It's still ugly, the user still has to edit if s/he wants it to be pretty, but it's still non pagekill.

Let's see. So you would still check your hash and/or array. Assume you've found a genuinely orphaned <u>. Hmm...but you wouldn't know that you've found one until you hit the end, which would be an appropriate time to append closing tags, but would take even more effort to go back again to the guilty party and edit.

So maybe that's not actually simpler.

You could still do something like...check your hash and/or array. Find orphan. Toss post into Hil's safeedit. Advise user that their code is ugly and to fix it please, without giving them the benefit of particularly helpful error messages. The board is still safe, although the user may be more or less agitated if they can't find, say, the mismatched quote, and thereby is forced to completely edit out their post. But even this doesn't offer the advantage of any less resource usage.

I gotta think some more.