Loooong lines

[rsc]

Is anyone else seeing this? The display of my friends' LJ entries is showing up with a line length which I estimate at exceeding 100 characters, which makes it a real pain to read, since it's wider than any window I can view. (Comments are fine.) This started yesterday.

Looks like whoever's monkeying with the LJ display software should back up to the last known working version and leave it alone until they're sure the new version works right.

Comments

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

Then perhaps you can explain why some sites successfully parse extra long URLs without stretching the cell it resides in.

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

Wel, most sites don't parse data in this context; user-agents usually do that. It would depend on the content of the URL string and the hyphenation behavior of the user agent. The user agent may evaluate certain characters inside the string-- most obviously the dash character, sometimes others such as the ampersand -- as reasonable places from which to wrap to the next line.

A web site might use PHP or similar scripting to interpret the page before sending it to the user agent. In that setup, it would be possible to detect overlong strings in the source content and break them up appropriately. However I don't think LJ works that way, nor do most web sites. If someone decides to post a 200-character URL in their journal, it's up to the user-agent to DTRT. Unfortunately most of them don't. *sigh* Scroll bars are ever so difficult to use. *cue violin music*

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

Thanx for confirming what I already knew was true -- websites can (and do) break up long URLs, and that LJ does not.

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

Ah. Thanks for clarifying your earlier comment.