Subject:
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Re: Colon character ":" getting changed to ">"
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Tue, 20 Jul 1999 03:22:57 GMT
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Viewed:
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196 times
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In lugnet.admin.general, Robert Munafo writes:
> I typed in a message:
>
> http://www.lugnet.com/general/?n=5653
>
> which happened to contain a colon ":" that ended up getting wrapped to the
> beginning of a line, and the colon got changed into a ">". (You can use
> "View Raw Message" to see it the way I typed it.)
>
> What happened, and how do I avoid it in the future?
That's the web display thingy doing its best to fix miscreant the quote
character ":" back into a ">", but it's failing miserably in the case you
discovered, because your ":" wasn't actually quoting anything.
The same thing would happen if you typed a ">" that ended up getting wrapped
to the beginning of a line, only it would actually come out as the right
character -- yet still in a different font style/color.
When it works, the automatic translation of ":" to ">" works well, but,
as you've discovered, it doesn't always work. Some sort of heuristic or
fuzzy confidence factor would probably be a lot safer than simply treating
">" and ":" equally without question. Perhaps it should consider relative
character frequencies in the column in question. If it did that, it would
see that the use of ":" in column 1 was far outweighed by the use of ">" in
that particular message.
Actually going and changing the :'s to >'s (rather than just leaving them
alone and suffering through their annoyance) was more of an issue when the
quoting level went 3 font sizes smaller and 3 colors lighter, compared to
its (now) one-size-and-color-fits-all display. The former only existed for
about a day, as the tiny font sizes and light colors drove people crazy.
--Todd
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Re: Colon character ":" getting changed to ">"
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| (...) I had a similar problem with emoticons: ":P" (colon, cap P - sticking your tongue out) displayed as ">P", thereby loosing the "so there" tongue-in-cheek attitude of the post. Instead, it was taken deadly serious and debated for about a week. (25 years ago, 20-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
| | | Re: Colon character ":" getting changed to ">"
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| I don't understand your answer at all. You say it's trying to "fix miscreant the quote character ':' back into a '>'". I don't know what "fix miscreant" means, but I do know that ":" and ">" aren't quote characters so I'm having trouble figuring out (...) (25 years ago, 26-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Colon character ":" getting changed to ">"
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| I typed in a message: (URL) happened to contain a colon ":" that ended up getting wrapped to the beginning of a line, and the colon got changed into a ">". (You can use "View Raw Message" to see it the way I typed it.) What happened, and how do I (...) (25 years ago, 19-Jul-99, to lugnet.admin.general)
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