Four Reasons Why Your HTML was Rejected - and How to Fix It!
Apr 23 '03 (Updated Apr 24 '03)
The Bottom Line The bottom line? bolding, italics, and links are fun - but only if they work!
The more things change, the more things stay the same. Fifty years ago, only professional printers could add bolding or italics to printed text. Anyone else had to pound out printed material on a manual typewriter, where the best one could do was to underline a few words. Then came advanced electric typewriters, some of which gave users access to script and italic fonts, but little else.
The biggest change in printing since Gutenberg arrived with ready availability of desktop computers: anyone with a computer and word-processing software could add bolding and italicization more or less at will. In the early days, though, the software merely inserted codes signifying that a different font was to be used, codes you could see by flipping a switch - at which time you'd see a line of text looking something like {BoldOn}bold{BoldOff} and {ItalOn}italic{ItalOff}, featuring what's known in the trade as "markup language."
As computers and software became more powerful, authors could begin to see the text and fonts change as they turned font characters on and off; a feature known in the industry as WYSIWYG. Pronounced "whizzy-wig," it's an initialism for What You See Is What You Get. These days, it's nearly impossible to find a word processor that isn't WYSIWYG.
For coding html, however - especially within our Epinions submission and comment windows - WYSIWYG just hasn't caught up: writers must type in a set of codes to force bolding, italicization, and embedded links. That's because html looks like those old non-WYSIWYG word processors: it's a markup language (html means hypertext markup language).
Of late, I've seen and heard complaints that reviewers are being greeted with the dreaded WARNING: non-standard markup language (HTML) when they attempt to code in their specifications. Everything, they say, is exactly as the instructions in the member center or in several reviews or on the bulletin boards told them to do it. So why doesn't the code work? Check against these suggestions:
Four Reasons Your HTML Code Fails
At this writing, the Epinions html parser (the doodad that reads what you type and translates it into the hypertext that your readers see) will cause problems for the following reasons:
1) Presence of spaces in the html "tags": The only space allowed in an html tag (the characters within the angle brackets <>) is before a VALUE statement. The only VALUE statement allowable in the Epinions submission window is the href statement inside the opening <a> tag. If you insert a space into any other tag at any other point, the parser will "kick it back" to you. That means that the following are unacceptable: <i >, < /a>, and </ b>
To fix, you must remove all spaces within the tags like so: <i>, </a>, and <b>
2) Use of capital letters in tags: The parser gets grumpy about this for some reason. The most likely occurrence is the <i> and </i> tags because many users compose in MS Word or other processing software, which an insidious little feature called "AutoCorrection." Whenever AutoCorrection sees an unaccompanied letter i, it automagically changes it to an uppercase I. Most of the time we don't even notice the change... but the parser does!
To fix, you can run a global replace in your word processor to change any I> to i> or make the changes in the Epinions submission window.
3) Improper nesting of tags: Think of a pair of html tags like a tiny room with two doors. If you open the second door while the first is open, the limited space requires that you close that second door before you can close the first. If you're trying to do two things at once, say both bolding and italics, the inner tagset MUST be closed before the outer tagset. Don't complain that it's always worked before, it doesn't work now - and it shouldn't work, because proper nesting of tags is an html standard.
The following will not work: <b>bolding and <i>italics</b></i>
To fix, close the inner tagset first and then close the outer tagset. Compare this to the line above: <b>bolding and <i>italics</i></b>.
Not only must you handle combined bolding and italics in this manner, you must also do the same if, for instance, you wish to italicize the title of a book when referring to it in an internal Epininos link, For instance, I might want to send people to my Google Hacks review. To do so, I must type in the following set of characters:
<a href="http://www.epinions.com/content_96207867524"><i>Google Hacks</i></a>
Note that the tag for italics closes before the "a" tag.
4) Use of non-standard characters in tagsets: This is the hardest possible error to track down, but once you recognize it and know what causes it, you're home (almost) free. This problem arises when authors compose in a WYSIWYG word processor and then use cut and paste to put their work into the submission window. There's nothing wrong with this, it's just that WYSIWYG word processors use some characters that the submission window does not properly identify. The biggest offenders are quote marks and apostrophes. The submission window expects what is known as ascii text for both of these characters, but word processors do not write ascii-standard quote marks!
So, when you attempt to paste in a link (as in the Google Hacks link above) - a sequence of characters that requires quote marks - the character pasted into the submission window is incorrect! If you're a very careful observer, you can recognize these characters. The quotation marks made from ascii characters are upright like this: " " ; while non-ascii quote marks are tilted top to the left before the quoted string and top to the right after the quoted string. That is, if you can see them at all. In the submission window, by the way, they appear grayed out...
Your link code, then, must adhere to the following sequence of characters that obeys all three of the previously-mentioned rules (no spaces, no capitals, proper nesting):
<a href="http://www.epinions.com/content_xxx"><i>italicized text</i></a>
Of course, if you don't wish to bold or italicize, you need not worry about the nested links question.
To fix non-standard characters, you may either save your word-processor review as a text file and open with a text editor (Notepad on a Windows machine) before cutting and pasting - the quote marks are automatically changed. If you don't want to go through this hassle, then you can edit every last quote mark in the submission window - that'll do the same thing.
Hope this helps! Oh, and by the way: cutting and pasting from this window will probably cause you exactly the same problems as cutting and pasting from a word processor. Type those characters yourself - being lazy, I wrote Word macros for all three tagsets...
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