# Testing tag weirdness. **URL:** \ **Category:** About This Message Board\ **Created:** [January 29, 2007, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953 "2007-01-29T09:57:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 15\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 9:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/1 "2007-01-29T09:57:53Z")
[Google](http://www.google.com) is perhaps the most popular search engine, but [Dogpile](http://www.dogpile.com) is a meta-search incorporating Google and other search engines, sometimes returning results that Google alone sometimes omits. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 9:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/2 "2007-01-29T09:59:21Z")
Interesting; I omitted the closing double-quotes in the first link in that post and it doesn’t appear at all - in fact everything up to the second link is missing (quote the first post in this thread and you’ll see it contains more than is visible above). ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 10:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/3 "2007-01-29T10:01:04Z")
Ah, it’s included all of the missing text in the URL to which it’s trying to link. I’m sure the old board reacted in a different way to this - I think it just displayed the malformed tag as text. ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 3:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/4 "2007-01-29T15:32:46Z")
That _is_ odd. even embedding a quote of it in code doesn’t protect the first sentence from oblivion. Desquarebracketized **Mangetout** : (url="[http://www.google.com](http://www.google.com))Google(/url) is perhaps the most popular search engine, but (url=“[http://www.dogpile.com](http://www.dogpile.com)”)Dogpile(/url) is a meta-search incorporating Google and other search engines, sometimes returning results that Google alone sometimes omits. ---
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2007, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/5 "2007-01-29T21:16:44Z")
IIRC, at one time using double quotes was required, but at some point that changed. The instructions now do not include double quotes with the url. [http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/misc.php?do=bbcode#url](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/misc.php?do=bbcode#url) To confuse this, sometimes double quotes will work anyway. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2007, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/6 "2007-01-30T02:15:50Z")
Forgetting to close the quotes inside the URL tag is a really common error for me; I’m certain that on the old server, this didn’t result in a big chunk of text being parsed as part of the URL, but we’re running the same version aren’t we? It’s not that I want to be able to make mistakes with impunity, it’s just that it seems the board’s reaction to this particular error is more severe than it used to be… ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [January 31, 2007, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/7 "2007-01-31T20:24:44Z")
I’ve certainly seen this problem crop up before (two links in a single post, squeezed together into a single link with the intervening text mangled into the URL), for many years, and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what caused it before. As I remember it, the problem originally occured whenever quote marks were omitted in a link. The problem was eventually half-fixed, so that if all the links in a post omitted the quote marks, they would all work, but if they’re mixed, you get what you saw. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2007, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/8 "2007-02-02T09:47:44Z")
[Google](http://www.google.com) is perhaps the most popular search engine, but ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2007, 9:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/9 "2007-02-02T09:49:01Z")
That’s more like what I’m accustomed to seeing - broken, but not vanished - maybe it’s the interaction of two links - one broken and one working, that I’ve never happened to see before. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2007, 9:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/10 "2007-02-03T09:10:43Z")
You’re kidding. I didn’t know anyone still used quotes with the url tag. They’re completely unnecessary, why type superfluous characters that add more likelihood of goofing up the tag? I still use the quotes for html links, because that was how I learned HTML in the first place years ago–has the necessity for that been dropped now too? ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2007, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/11 "2007-02-04T19:30:12Z")
> [@](#): > > You’re kidding. I didn’t know anyone still used quotes with the url tag. They’re completely unnecessary, why type superfluous characters that add more likelihood of goofing up the tag? And I didn’t know anyone still omitted the quotes. Why leave off a mere couple of characters if it’ll add more likelihood of goofing up the tag? ---
**Author:** ![DSYoungEsq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c6cbf5/32.png) [@DSYoungEsq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DSYoungEsq)\ **Post date:** [February 4, 2007, 9:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/12 "2007-02-04T21:18:42Z")
I have to go with the “why add quote marks?” group. The tags work just fine without them. I haven’t used them since the first time I forgot and it all worked out fine. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![rowrrbazzle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rowrrbazzle/32/414_2.png) [@rowrrbazzle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rowrrbazzle)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2007, 12:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/13 "2007-02-05T00:37:40Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Why leave off a mere couple of characters if it’ll add more likelihood of goofing up the tag? Because the method documented in the official FAQ is not to use them at all. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2007, 12:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/14 "2007-02-05T12:03:00Z")
Force of habit, I guess. I can’t remember where I picked up that habit, but I think it was on an old board that had problems parsing unquoted strings containing spaces. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [February 5, 2007, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/testing-tag-weirdness/389953/15 "2007-02-05T15:05:47Z")
[QUOTE=Chronos] And I didn’t know anyone still omitted the quotes. Why leave off a mere couple of characters if it’ll add more likelihood of goofing up the tag? [/QUOTE] What? You have it backwards. Fewer characters entered means less likelihood of a typo. When I took classes in computer programming, the first principle we learned was called K.I.S.S. (keep it simple, sweetie)