Normally, in HTML, consecutive whitespace chaacters are all run together, and the carriage return character is ignored (to get a hard return, you need a tag). However, if it’s enclosed by <pre> and </pre> tags, all of these things are not ignored. Also, it causes the browser to put the contents into a fixed-width font, so “i” is the same width as “w”, for instance. What this means is that the contents of <pre> tags will show up the same way that they would in Notepad, for instance. The vB [[sup][/sup]code] tag basically just translates to HTML <pre> tags, plus a couple of horizontal lines and the word “code”.
They’re useful for a variety of things, such as ASCII art (where you need a fixed-width font) and equations. For instance,
GMm
F = -----
r^2
How did we get on this topic, anyway?
Thanks, Chronos. I think I’m just going to need to play around with it a little.
I apologize for taking this thread so far afield.
Well, Dumb Ox, I see you got the lowdown on the {sup} and {sub} tags. Congratulations on your successful vB coding! I was late at the party once again.
Why was HTTP disabled? Were the trolls really that creative with it? I mean, a few <refresh> tags that loop would be annoying, but HTTP’s a much more powerful mark-up language (not really a programming code) than this vB dialect. Maybe that’s a bad thing. I just want to show off a few bits of HTTP I know, that’s all.
Okay, replace every instance of HTTP with HTML in my previous post. It’s people like me that probably shouldn’t be writing in code at all… :o
We had to disable html because that’s what used to set the board parameters and some folks thought it would be fun to mess with it. After we wrestled with some of these problems for a while, it just got to be too much of a hassle to deal with and too big a risk to take.
Everything that we’ve removed from the user side of the board generally came about because of abuse. It gives us no satisfaction to take these things away from the Teeming Millions; to the contrary. It would be great to be in a situation where we could be open and offer our users all kinds of great options here on the board, but as long as we have a situation where people take advantage of that openness to annoy and harass others and to screw with the board, we have to be restrictive.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I realize that this is really a question for the progammers over at Jelsoft, but would it be possible to implement HTML, but to specifically filter out certain “dangerous” tags? I know that tags can be added, on an individual basis, to the vB code, but it seems to me that there’s a lot more “good” tags than “bad” ones… It’d be easier, then, to explicitly exclude all of the “bad” ones than to explicitly include all of the “good” ones. Specifically:
Java and <meta> tags could cause all sorts of weirdness
Table tags could seriously disrupt the layout of the board
Frame tags could be a pain in the neck
img tags raise questions about copywrites and bandwidth stealing
Are there any others which would be problematic? If that’s all there is, it should be easy to filter out that small subset of tags from a document.
Couldn’t one solution be to give access to the html features to users who have shown themselves to be serious posters, e.g. using a cutoff number of messages posted? Then potential abusers would be kept out without limiting the creativity of productive members.
At the present time there is no way to allow the use of html by some individuals and not by others. It’s a global user right; it’s on or off.
For those that point out that’s what system hacks are for, let me remind you that our technical staff is averse to the use of hacks; the further you get away from plain vanilla, the more difficult it becomes to upgrade and maintain the system.
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator