Rio's non-closed whitefont tag led to the post after hers ending up in whitefont as well.

Leaving aside the idea of automatically closing tags, or force-closing tags, nobody bothered to say "Rio doesn't need to code her own white-font tags any more?"

We coded a short-cut, remember?

To each ...

But the principle still stands -- some people just (d/w)on't like that, and there are un-shortcutted tags.

Well just for the record, any solution that involves us trying to second-guess the HTML and browser relationship is just doomed to failure. If people make a mistake, then we have admins to fix it. Much better than trying to figure out all possible combinations of bad HTML and all the possible ways a browser might try to display them.

And someone should tell Rio about the s-shortcut next time she's around.

But what about Gar's suggestion that the tags be counted and forced closed? I don't love the cycles, but ...

What the hell does WX do?

But what about Gar's suggestion that the tags be counted and forced closed? I don't love the cycles, but ...

I think that's in the Doomed To Failure box too. Really you'd have to use a proper HTML parsing module, and even they can't always pinpoint the moment that Good HTML Goes Bad, just sign off that it is actually good.

What the hell does WX do?

I think it's just an accident that the code they use for the message display is different to ours (for instance, if an unclosed link tag is inside a TD, then there's more chance the browser will close it off than if it's just in a P) and that people don't notice the odd error there, or that they do, and don't feel they can do anything about it.

Let's experiment at little, shall we?

Hmm. PF closed my unclosed tags for me.

This is a post containing an unclosed font tag:

and the text from here on is pink...

edit by ita: Not any more, you bad man!

OK so it's pink for the rest of that table cell in my browser, i.e. the

To post a message, compose your text in the box below, then click on Post Message.

is not pink because the post area is one table cell, but the posting box and instructions are outside that cell and presumably the whole table as well.

Now I'm going to post with an unclosed link tag:

Front Page Of Buffistas dot Org

And again, the linkiness extends for the rest of the pos (but doesn't over-write the

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links) but it doesn't extend down to the posting box.

Again, it's my mileage, so it may vary, but I'm on IE5 on Mac.

It's working well in Opera on a Mac.