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

[stealthpup.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. I'd been made aware that, if a friend's entry contains a graphic wider than one's default, the line length will be adjusted to accommodate that graphic. You might be seeing the consequence of that.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

Could be, although I don't see any graphics that wide at a casual glance. In any case, I regard that as a bug. Is there any way I can make it go away, or do I have to wait until the offending entry (assuming there is one) is no longer among the most recent 25?

[stealthpup.livejournal.com]

If my diagnosis is correct, then, no, I don't know of a way to force it.

[jss]

It's also a problem when people put really long URLs in there, since http://site/path/file?opt=val&opt=val [...] is all "nonbreakable" so it won't line-wrap. Personally, I think people who do that should be disemboweled without anaesthesia. (And if I'm being helpful I'd direct them to makeashorterlink.com and tinyurl.com. But who wants to be helpful when they're such idjits?)

[rsc.livejournal.com]

I forgot to look at URLs. I think we have a winner.

[rsc.livejournal.com]

All better now. And I didn't even have to threaten to disembowel him.

[italiangm.livejournal.com]

Of course, sometimes said idjit doesn't know that LJ can't effectively manage long, non-breakable URLs.

[ranger1.livejournal.com]

It's a browser issue, actually.

[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.