Be Careful With '>' and '<'

[Cowhead]

I think I just figured something out. (I'll wait for the applause to die down...) I won't call this a bug, because I think I have seen it happen in other programs.

You know the little smiley faces people make with characters, like ? There's another old convention from BBSs and Internet, to use >g' and '<' should be reversed, so it looks more like {g}.

I found to my chagrin that a message I posted earlier had a couple grin-signals *stripped out*, which might have made it possible to miss the light-hearted tone I had intended.

As I mentioned, I believe I have seen this same thing happen in other settings. Now I think I know why: Some text-processing part of the program thinks that it has found an HTML or XML tag embedded in the text, and it strips out the supposed tag to make the text more readable.

As the world moves more and more to various flavors of HTML and XML, this is probably unavoidable, so I'll have to find another convention to use. Smiley faces work, but they feel overused. Anyone else know a good smile-indicator?

-- Cowhead

[Marvin]

Hello,

As the cheshire cat said: don't sweat the small stuff!
As I said in my background blurb: life's too short.

(Thud! As I fall on the floor!) Hey! Diabetes is humorless!

Or is that sugarless!

Later,

Marvin

[Programmer]

I think what is happening is that the page presents the message as html. The problem is that 'g' is not a recognised tag. But could you should be able to use other html tags. He grins to himself. You should also be able to get around it by typing ampersand-lt-semicolon for a less-than symbol, and ampersand-gt-semicolon for a greater-than symbol &lt.g&gt.. The trouble is it takes so long you will probably lose all sense of spontaniety!