markup rant

[egypturnash]

I hate BBcode. It is just enough like HTML to trip me up - and to make cutting-and-pasting something originally marked up in HTML a total pain. I just discovered, for instance, that FA's BBcode parser barfs if you have quotes around a URL.

If you're building something and don't want to go through the pain of parsing and sanitizing HTML to defend against malicious users, then use a simplified markup language like Textile or Markdown, with syntax that is clearly Not HTML, instead of that ugly monstrosity.

Comments

[kynn.livejournal.com]

/cosigned

[melskunk.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I use the firefox bbcode/htmlcode plugin and I still find myself messing up. :P

[relee.livejournal.com]

I don't think anybody is actually implementing bbcode, it just comes with software plugins they use and they're too lazy to modify it into something else.

[nmccoy.livejournal.com]

Oh hi Relee. Hooray for more small-internet moments. (Yes, that's me from the UJ forums. And possibly also Second Life.)

[relee.livejournal.com]

Hi~!

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

For serious. BBCode is trouble.

[eriscontrol.livejournal.com]

Also there are at least five million different libraries for cleaning up HTML. What it comes down to is recognising anything that even resembles a tag and killing all the ones that aren't on a whitelist.