h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Jim

I'm trying to do my entries in GuideML and I'm having trouble setting up a pullquote. As instructed in the Quick Guide I've typed this <PULLQUOTE ALIGN=&#8220;Left&#8221; EMBED="Right"> to try to get a pullquote on the right of the page with left-aligned text and with the main body of text flowing round it - the preview keeps telling me the attributes are wrong - can you help?

Pip

Oooooooooooh!

This is a *very* sneaky problem. Have you been editing this page in a word processor? Microsoft Word? I'd guess you have.

The reason it doesn't like the attributes is because the "Left" attribute actually has 'sexed' quotes - meaning proper opening and closing quotes as you'd want if you were writing a letter or a document.

However, GuideML wants sexless quotes - ASCII code 34 - which it can't find.

Copy and paste this pullquote tag below into your document and see how you go...

&lt;PULLQUOTE ALIGN="Left" EMBED="Right"&gt;

That should work fine.

Is there a font I could use on Word that would stop this problem?

Oh dear - now I'm getting a blank page when I press the review button, so I tried posting the entry so I could edit it from there but that came up as a blank page too (A162433) - have I broken h2g2?

Pip

It's not your fault. It looks like a bug in our XML conversion. It doesn't seem to like having tags directly inside a PULLQUOTE tag. So, for example,
hello
will go wrong while

hello

will work.

You could always try using notepad or saving the file as a text file only.

I agree, notepad is much safer. There still seems to be a problem with preview though, as it changes the margins, although they come out ok on the user page. Any ideas?

It's because the form is a certain width.

Sorry to bug you Jim, but did you get the emmail I sent about my problem with CDATA?

;^)#

Yes - sorry I haven't replied. It's unfortunately a bug which we're looking at. We don't have a fix yet, though.

Perhaps it might be a good idea to remove the reference to CDATA from the don't panic pages at http://www.h2g2.com/A155701

Could you do me a favour & delete my home page then please so I can rebuild it.

;^)#

OK. I've edited your page to remove the CDATA.

Thanks muchly - I will try not to break it again.

;^)#

Thanks for the suggestions folks - Notepad works a treat and I'm cooking on gas. I've even got photos and an animated gif on my page now

Pip

Uhm... Perhaps I'm just blind right now, but I don't see the difference. I thought whitespace (including s) was basically ignored?

Apparently, they're not completely ignored by the parser - just not turned into new lines on output to your browser.

;^)#

Uhm... He said it didn't like formatting tags inside pullquote tags, and I see them both exactly the same but for the new lines in the code, which is what I don't get.

I think he said 'directly inside a PULLQUOTE tag'. Basically the example without the CRs will blow up whilst the example with the CRs will work just fine.

From what I understand the GuideML we enter is stored as entered in a database. The site generates html pages for our browsers on the fly from those database entries.

My guess is its probably something to do with the parser examining each entry character by character (or block by block) & not dealing with the character immediately following being any other than text or white space. But I could be wrong, its been a *ahem* while since I wrote a code generator (I wonder if they still use 80 column punch cards? )

;^)#

LOL

I hope you don't mind me using the *ahem* - I should probably have hung a copyright sign on it


;^)#