Livejournal WTFery?

[shadesofmauve]

I posted links to my art yesterday. This morning I actually checked them, it not having occured to me that I'd have to check links that were a direct copy-paste. They were borked. I looked at the code I'd entered. It was not borked. I clicked on the link, looked at the address in the bar. Borked.

So, in the program I'm using for my webpage (Zenphoto), albums and images are generated with an address path including "album & image = image" (only without spaces). Well and dandy. Enter Livejournal.

Livejournal replaces the "& image" part of this with a, er, squiggle. Some kind of special character of which neither I nor my website are aware.

For whatever reason, entering the links as links in Rich Text format sorts it out, but there was a bit of hair-tearing. Anyone know why the "& image" section of the address is so problematic?

Comments

[coffeejunkie.livejournal.com]

Your delima in interesting and if it hadn't been for a post this morning of another friend of mine, I wouldn't know the answer can be found with this link: http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/text/specialcharacters.html

Wacky html.

[shadesofmauve]

Thanks! I didn't know about that special character. Though, I'm still confused about two things...

1. As Tobyn points out, special character symbols are supposed to require a semicolon.

2. I thought they were supposed to be ignored when inside a pair of quotes within an html tag (as they are in the link). Material within quotes in the tag should be delivered exactly as is.

[zair99.livejournal.com]

Cofeejunkie's comment is exactly right. If you say ℑ then you get a funky symbol! (ℑ) OF course, you're SUPPOSED To have to have the semi-colon at the end to make it work. That might be some livejournal weirdness.

[shadesofmauve]

Yup! Shouldn't it technically be ignoring it since it's within quotes within a tag anyway, too?

I'm going to see if there's an option for zenphoto with prettified filepaths/addies. In the meantime, I'll just use the rich text entry (ugh) to post any image links.

Good to hear from you, btw! What's up? How's things?

[zair99.livejournal.com]

I've never heard of a browser ignoring anything because it's stuck inside a link. Haven't you ever had a weird link with iso characters in it, yet it still manages to find its way to the right page? I think, so long as there's a semicolon at the end, it'll always look for that character. What the LJ rendering is doing weird is accepting it as an iso character without the requisite semicolon! It's almost like a tag... without the & at the beginning and the ; at the end, it shouldn't work! Yet LJ makes it. :P

As for things, things are pretty good! I shall tell you more later.

[shadesofmauve]

Urgh, had crossover from different kinds of code - (php, excel macros), where anything within quotes is treated as text not-to-be-touched. This applies to multiple aspects of multiple things, but HREF tags - those are specifically excluded.

So as you say, the oddity is the missing semi-colon, without which it should be happy.