Tavern on the Meta

8:01 PM

Let's face it: the single biggest reason we have sites like Quirksmode is that back in the day, the IE team completely dropped the ball

Pekka

@balpha yeah, absolutely immaculate info. Great research.

Shog9

(because they were fired, etc.)

Pekka

@Shog9 absolutely

Shog9

If they'd been doing their job, you wouldn't look to some third-party website, you'd read MSDN

Pekka

Yeah. They had a number of great innovations, like filters (Opacity and other massively complex image manipulation filtering was present in IE5!)

But they indeed dropped the ball

I can understand everyone who wants to burn IE with fire.

Shog9

8:02 PM

even so, I've more than once answered a question on SO where someone was observing odd behavior in IE by simply opening up the relevant MSDN docs and noting that behavior explicitly described in detail

Pekka

@Shog9 also true

Shog9

So here are folks tearing their hair out reading W3Schools, Quirksmode, MDC, whatever... And the answer is in the official docs for the browser they're fighting with

See why I'm not wild about some big new third-party site?

Pekka

@Shog9 fair point. Still, it's far from perfect. One example: CMYK images

I have yet to see an official mention somewhere on MSDN that IE can't deal with CMYK JPGs.

I have at least four "You are using a CMYK image, IE can't deal with those, you need to use an RGB one" accepted SO answers over the issue. I searched for reference links every time, and never found any

balpha

Feb 11 at 21:26, by balpha

why do supposedly technical Microsoft articles always have to sound like advertisements?

Pekka

Point being, there is information about each HTML and DOM element - also cross-browser information - that would be worth collecting in a resource like quirksmode, but community owned and editable and possibly even with a voting system.

@balpha hahaha! Probably because a department of lawyers, and one of PR people looks over each technical document before it is released.

Shog9

8:06 PM

If only there was some site that allowed users to post questions on these topics, and then let community members edit the responses....

balpha

@Shog9 now you're dreamin

Pekka

@Shog9 now you're dreaming.

Ah

Shog9

(FWIW, MSDN does allow user-submitted content on the technical articles. It's a bit of a mess, but that's MSDN all over)

Pekka

MSDN is a bit like our basement. I only go there when I really, really need something and know exactly where it is

Shog9

If you worked with WinAPI, you'd be a basement-dweller...

Pekka

8:08 PM

Yeah, I can imagine!

balpha

@Pekka it's indispensable for .NET stuff

Shog9

(now there's a good example of a situation where trying to rely on third-party docs can seriously mess you up)

user153011

I've recently found out that if you pass a string/regex literal to language constructs (e.g. throw, typeof), you don't need a space before the literal. So you can do typeof'test' and typeof/test/. This is useful for code golfs.

Shog9

because typeof is an operator

user153011

@Shog9 operator? more like a language construct

Shog9

8:10 PM

oh wait, you didn't make the observation I thought you were making. Nevermind...

user153011

It works with object/array literals, too.

Pekka

@Shog may I ask where your nick name comes from? And why the 9?

If it is a nickname, that is

Shog9

You can ask...

Indeed, you may ask...

Pekka

Where does your nick name come from? And why the 9?

If it is a nickname, that is

Shog9

It is a nickname, or rather, a pseudonym. A decade ago, I needed one, and this is what popped into my head.

with that said... I'm leaving to play frisbee golf. 'Later...

Pekka

8:15 PM

Ah, fair enough. It sticks in your head for some reason

Later!

(the pseudonym, not the frisbee)

user153011

Stack Exchange GIS Q: Does an earthquake affect GPS? http://t.co/creO6r8

Tweeted by rchern on March 13, 2011 at 8:21 PM

Rebecca Chernoff

That was rather speedy. Am I being stalked? |:

Michael Petrotta

I need to stop watching the news.

Pekka

Can't you follow people on Twitter?

Making stalking a socially acceptable activity? ;)

Michael Petrotta

Making exhibitionism a socially acceptable activity, too.

user153011

8:26 PM

@RebeccaChernoff No, it's because I'm following you on twitter and TweetDeck is checking for new tweets every minute. (:

Pekka

@Nyuszika7H that's what I figured

Rebecca Chernoff

Nah, nah, I get that.

It was just the speed.

Pekka

@MichaelPetrotta yeah that too.

Myles Gray

0

Q: Get part of class name from parent and apply to child JQuery

I have the following HTML: <tr class="wiring_details_6-48"> <td colspan="2"> Wire Type: <select name="select_wire_6" onchange="Estimate.select_wire( 6, this.value, 0 );"> <option value="" selected="">Select wire..</option> <opt...

Rebecca Chernoff

As in, after I pushed the button to send the tweet, I alt+tabbed here...and saw my tweet oneboxed.

Myles Gray

8:27 PM

jQuery wizards, any ideas?

Pekka

http://chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/transcript/message/564456#564456
Yeah. It's interesting how different media show things differently.
On somne stations, there is a permanent meltdown going on in three nuclear platns

Michael Petrotta

@MylesGray you should probably post that on SO. :)

Myles Gray

@MichaelPetrotta it is on SO ;)

Michael Petrotta

I felt the need to educate myself on 40-year-old nuclear generation technology.

And now I see the errors (or at least inconsistencies) in current mass media reports.

Pekka

That is surely interesting

Michael Petrotta

8:29 PM

@MylesGray: yeah, I was making a funny. Not so funny.

Myles Gray

:P

Pekka

It's in times of crisis that it becomes totally obvious that all the online media are pageview whores and nothing else

Myles Gray

@Pekka It really is annoying how they say "meltdown in 2 reactors"

theres no meltdown

Michael Petrotta

Note: no containment buildings have been breached. Despite scary reports.

Pekka

@MylesGray yeah

Myles Gray

8:30 PM

the walls blew off and did what they were MEANT to do

Michael Petrotta

@MylesGray: there may have been a meltdown. But it's not as scary as it sounds.

Myles Gray

and suddenly you see on site "we are watching the next chernobyl"

Pekka

On Spiegel, Germany's leading online news portal, there have been cores melting all the time since saturday morning, with breaking news and yellow bars every ten minutes

Michael Petrotta

and yet I can't stop reading.

Pekka

(They are entirely funded from online advertising... go figure.)

Myles Gray

8:31 PM

chernobyl happened because the reactor rods over heated, melted and then caused a chain reaction which damaged the container and BOOM

radioactive goodness for pripyat

user153011

Missing the reputation graph? http://stackapps.com/questions/2202/reputation-graph

Tweeted by systempuntoout on March 13, 2011 at 8:23 PM

user153011

45% of people don't feel comfortable navigating the Web says @sethjs #meebo #SXSW

Tweeted by meebo on March 13, 2011 at 8:35 PM

mootinator

kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/…

4

Pekka

@mootinator reading, very nice

Impressive.

> Ogaki has approximately 150,000 people. The city’s disaster preparedness plan lists exactly how many come from English-speaking countries. It is less than two dozen. Why have a maintained list of English translators at the ready? Because Japanese does not have a word for excessive preparation.

Hahaha

Michael Petrotta

I have a feeling that that has the same truth value as "there's no word in Russian for 'freedom'", but good reading.

Myles Gray

8:44 PM

@MichaelPetrotta how dare you disgrace our glorious leader Vladimir :O

:P

user153011

I've found a bug in W3C's validator. This validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict, though IDs can't start with underscores.

user153011

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8' ?>
<!DOCTYPE html  PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xml:lang='en' lang='en'>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='application/xhtml+xml; charset=utf-8' />
		<title>Example</title>
	</head>
	<body>
		<h1>Hello, world!</h1>
		<p id='_test'>This document validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict.</p>
	</body>
</html>

Pekka

@MichaelPetrotta it is, yeah. Definitely a massively different perspective from the general buzz. Really worth a read

mootinator

@MichaelPetrotta nod

user153011

9:01 PM

I filed a bug about this.

wcoenen

I'm suddenly feeling the urge to fix all the "dependancy" typos on stackoverflow: stackoverflow.com/search?q=dependancy

would that fall under the "trivial edit" no-no?

Michael Petrotta

@wcoenen: Thanks a lot for triggering my OCD. :)

Pekka

@Nyuszika7H nice! I don't know the exact rules about ids, but this makes sense

Interested to see what comes out of it

user153011

> ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods ("."). w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-name

Pekka

@Nyuszika7H fair enough

mootinator

9:04 PM

@wcoenen I have an ill-advised query for that: UPDATE posts SET message='dependency' WHERE message LIKE '%dependancy%'

wcoenen

hehe

Michael Petrotta

@mootinator: Um, wow, will that do the wrong thing.

Pekka

@Nyuszika7H Ah, XHTML 1.0 seems to derive its ID rules from somewhere else

Check this: lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2010May/0028.html

mootinator

@MichaelPetrotta Not if getting the point across is the right thing. Muhahahahhaa.

Pekka

It seems allowed in XHTML 1.0 after all.

user153011

9:06 PM

@Pekka Oh.

user153011

rchern said oy 276 times.

Tim Stone

@Pekka Yeah, it's a NCName, so it can start with an underscore or letter.

(err, bad link, but point remains)

Rebecca Chernoff

@Nyuszika7H I see way too many stars. ):

user153011

!rchern say Oy!

Pekka

@RebeccaChernoff I see way too few! That is not even 50% coverage. Somebody needs to step up and use their star allowance for a few days

Rebecca Chernoff

9:11 PM

oh gawd

Pekka

@TimStone yeah!

Tim Stone

Hahah

Pekka

@TimStone for the record, I have taken my punishment and my plate is now clean

Where Pekka gets kicked in the shin for linking to w3schools

1 hour ago, 7 minutes total – 25 messages, 2 users, 0 stars

Bookmarked 22 secs ago by Pekka

Tim Stone

Well, as long as you've learned your lesson, surely we can forgive you. ;)

Michael Mrozek

Personally, I don't really care where you link as long as the page is accurate

ircmaxell

9:15 PM

lol

Pekka

I will now wait for the other sinners to take their kicking :)

Tim Stone

I know, we'll have to harass Marc so much now. :P

Pekka

@TimStone MDC it (usually) is... Although I would like something better

Tim Stone

Yeah, I'd agree to that. MDC annoys me sometimes, but the information quality is pretty high.

Pekka

Yeah.

Tim Stone

9:17 PM

Hmm, whenever anyone asks how chat was built, I should link them to w3schools now. >:)

user153011

EVIL ALERT! Starting EvilDetector™ 2.0...

user153011

Searching for evil users...

user153011

Result: ['Michael Petrotta', Tim Stone']

Michael Petrotta

runs

dammit.

Tim Stone

@MichaelMrozek Well, it was a good try at least. The question managed to remain open for a whole two hours!

Michael Mrozek

9:27 PM

@TimStone Seriously? I even went back and reread that question to make sure it was in fact completely different, as I specifically said in the post and in the comments

Oh well. Personally I think it makes SO look bad, but other than that I couldn't care less about nofollow

Tim Stone

@MichaelMrozek The post mentions rep at the very end, so I guess that was enough to avoid the issue.

That's pretty much how I feel about it too.

Michael Mrozek

@TimStone I guess. I'll downvote Jeff's answer there to make myself feel better, as the Wikipedia comparison is ridiculous

Tim Stone

@MichaelMrozek Yeah, it seems kind of senseless to say "Well, we do it because Wikipedia does it" when Wikipedia doesn't have a comparable sense of "trusted" content.

Michael Mrozek

It's more amusing when you factor in all the people whining that we don't do edits the same as Wikipedia

Shog9

trusted user != trusted content

Tim Stone

9:39 PM

Why not, in a practical sense?

Shog9

Trusted user, in the SO sense, means you know how to use the site, and so we trust you to do that.

Trusted content, in the Google sense, means it's linked to from lots of trusted content.

You could argue that an up-voted answer on SO is trusted content

but not necessarily that everything else by that content's author is trusted

if I have 10 brilliant answers and 10 bordering-on-spam answers, should the former give the latter free juice?

Tim Stone

That's fair enough.

Though I'm not sure that up votes are trustworthy either.

Shog9

@MichaelMrozek As for this... If some 1-rep user goes around linking every language keyword in a Jon Skeet post to a MSDN-scraped page on CodeDoxAndAds.com, whose rep applies to the link?

(assuming the edits actually get approved, of course...)

@TimStone Well, I'm not either, but if we were gonna start un-nofollowing things, I'd prefer to start there.

Michael Mrozek

Come to think of it, you need 10 rep to post multiple links. Can a 1-rep user suggest an edit with multiple links?

Shog9

Frankly, I think it's a huge can of worms, and that's probably why Wikipedia disallows it. IMHO, Jeff punted when he answered, "'cause WP does it" - but that doesn't mean their rationale doesn't apply.

@MichaelMrozek donno... TRY IT!!1

one

badp's sockpuppet

9:47 PM

Weird -- you do need a 2ker to approve your edit anyway

even if you have 1 rep yourself

so applying restrictions there is kinda pointless

Shog9

Not if it kills spam before it has to be human-moderated.

I mean, that's the point of the posting restriction, right?

badp's sockpuppet

Dunno, if a 2ker "sponsors" you why wouldn't you be able to overcome it?

I guess it's overkill given that the restrictions are removed at like 10

Michael Mrozek

Then I'd say nofollow should work the same

Shog9

To be clear: I think gaming the system for spam or ranks or whatever is probably fairly difficult at this point. But there's obviously money to be had, and folks will put in a 40 hour week to crush your best moderation efforts if it's worth a good living to them selling page rank.

badp's sockpuppet

@MichaelMrozek The system only trusts moderators to not turn evil (we never get any captcha on sites we mod after all; given the kind of people who do get diamonds this is obviously a misleading idea)

Shog9

9:53 PM

SO benefits immensely from having good "rep" in Google. Imagine how much it would suck if each new post had to earn "google rep" on its own...

badp's sockpuppet

@Shog9 I'm still concerned that suggested edits default to HTML diff, and not markdown diff. You can't hide shenanigans in markdown.

...not easily

Shog9

mmm, yes...

Myles Gray

Volcano anyone? nydailynews.com/news/world/2011/03/13/…

George Marian

10:15 PM

Welll, isn't this lovely? I can't set my iPhone's alarm to 2 AM anything. They all get set to 1 AM something.

Presumably, this will only be an issue today, because of the time change.

Rebecca Chernoff

abc.net.au/news/events/japan-quake-2011/beforeafter.htm

badp's sockpuppet

So Apport warned me of a "serious kernel problem" I know nothing about

it then asked me if I wanted to report it

it then asked me how often did this happen... er, this is the first time

it then asked me what the problem was with exactly... er, I expected you to tell me

it then asked me if I had this problem with a previous version of the kernel... er, I wasn't aware I'd even updated it

it then asked me about more questions I didn't know the answer to

and finally, it asked me this:

George Marian

LOL

badp's sockpuppet

I'm going to assume this is a trick question. The default is No, so I'll pick Yes.

Michael Petrotta

i or no i? What's so hard?

badp's sockpuppet

10:22 PM

And, finally, the problem report

> CRDA: [Error 2] No such file or directory

rolls eyes

Tim Stone

@RebeccaChernoff Oh wow :/

@badpssockpuppet Brilliant!

Rebecca Chernoff

@TimStone yeah, was posted to my gps question.

Tim Stone

They knew they couldn't trust your user input anyway, so they sidestepped the whole issue by taking the entire question away from you.

badp's sockpuppet

@RebeccaChernoff man, the earthquake was so bad, the airplane takeoff lane changed its painting

Tim Stone

Hahah shakes head That was bad :P

user153011

10:48 PM

Hi again! :)

Kev

anyone here with enough rep to tell me if the OP deleted this question on SF? serverfault.com/questions/246946/…

Rebecca Chernoff

yes

Kev

i thought they couldn't do that if it had an upvote or an answer?

thanks for the stickers btw :)

Rebecca Chernoff

There was an edit a couple minutes before the deletion:

> EDIT: I seem to have uploaded a temp version that messed up the routing - the latest build fixed it. :S

Kev

ah ok...thought I'd dreamt I'd answered that question :)

Rebecca Chernoff

10:52 PM

Hmm, the rules were tweaked recently, but I'd have to search MSO or look at the code for the exact numbers.

Kev

worth asking on MSO?

Rebecca Chernoff

Nah, it's already there, hang on.

Kev

k

Rebecca Chernoff

looks like it is more than 1 answer

Kev

ok...cool....ta

user153011

10:56 PM

oy!

Rebecca Chernoff

11

A: Does systematic self-deleting need to be prevented?

This already happens, though -- if a question has sufficient answers and/or votes, the question owner is prevented from deleting it. Originally based on http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/01/adventures-in-delclusionism/ Edit: I've tightened up the requirements here based on recent abuse by a sp...

Kev

thanks Rebecca

Pekka

Rebecca beat me to the punch.

user153011

setInterval(function() {
    jQuery.post('/chats/89/messages/new', {
        'message': 'oy!',
        'fkey': fkey().fkey
    });
}, Math.floor(Math.random() * (120000 - 60000 + 60000) + 1));

user153011

> POST chat.meta.stackoverflow.com/chats/89/messages/new 400 (Bad Request)

Mark Elliot

11:14 PM

anyone have any thoughts on edits like these?

stackoverflow.com/suggested-edits/17141

Michael Petrotta

@MarkElliot: definitely reject. Far too much additional content and spin added to the OP's answer.

Mark Elliot

@MichaelPetrotta what I figured, but it's a shame, since the additions would probably make a great new answer

Michael Petrotta

@MarkElliot: yeah, I'm seeing a lot of those, and it pains a little to reject them. But it's important to respect the intentions of the original author, and it takes 0 rep to post an additional answer after all.

Jacob

@MarkElliot definitely changes the question too much

Michael Petrotta

Need to make that clear to modifiers somehow.

Mark Elliot

11:20 PM

@MichaelPetrotta yep, generally I reject them, but I thought maybe I'd discuss before someone jumped at me for doing so

Michael Petrotta

@MarkElliot: too late :)

user153011

any MySQL expert there? how can I check for something's length other than LIKE '____'?

Mark Elliot

@Nyuszika7H dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/…

user153011

@MarkElliot thanks

user153011

night :)

Mark Elliot

11:33 PM

@Nyuszika7H you can use LENGTH() instead of CHAR_LENGTH() if you're not worried about multi-byte characters

Richard aka cyberkiwi

11:53 PM

How's this for controversy?

0

A: Should we cap reputation gained from questions at +2000?

In a comment Waffles said ONLY asking questions and not answering anything is anti community I am opposed to this sentiment. Let's not pretend that SO is not about questions. I hazard a guess that above 90% of questions if not above 95% are mundane drivel of trivial questions. SO is clearly...

Mark Elliot

@Richardakacyberkiwi drop-by question askers aren't the ones this targets

the point is that people who ask trivial questions day-in-day-out and get onesy-twosy upvotes on 500 questions end up with more privileges than they really should have

considering their community participation

Where Pekka gets kicked in the shin for linking to w3schools

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