HTML charcter entities and the 10,000-character limit

Discussion in 'Site Feedback' started by Tiassa, Dec 24, 2017.

  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    re: HTML charcter entities and the 10,000-character limit

    The fun part is the informal expression, l'esprit de la douche. Never mind, showers and light bulbs are a dangerous mix.

    Every now and then members run up against a per-post limit of ten thousand characters. And members who write posts pushing up against the limit might notice any number of seeming quirks. The most obvious are the system trying to close tags left open, especially in the dynamic editor, and any hyperlinks left untagged will be tagged.

    It's the other seeming deviations that are getting to me. With no tags or links left to finish, 9975 < 9994 > 10000. Unable to figure out the problem when six less somehow meant more, a reserve might be to pull, say, nineteen more characters by eliminating the second, ne'er-represented blank space after a period. In the end, 9975 > 10000, which cannot be. Quite obviously, the system requires space to do something.

    And that something is the translation of certain characters into HTML entities; or, rather, it's the first only possible obvious vector that, thankfully, isn't actually lightning when it strikes in the shower.

    My text editor counts characters as characters. Before the data runs through the CSS, so would the system; but the system counts once the data is properly arranged within the CSS, so it has replaced any number of characters with their html entities, including all the bullets and arrows I use, and even the long dashes, and, yes, smart-quotes and -apostrophes, and diacritic letters. The standard three-dot ellipsis, for instance, requires … uh … oh, there it is … either eight or nine characters according to the entity protocol used; one of the reasons people use it in Twitter, for instance, is that it counts as one character.

    The preceding sentence counts as two hundred forty-six characters according to Gedit, and Twitter would count it the same way; add as many as twenty-six more characters for the ellipses, which are represented by between six and nine characters depending on how the entity is invoked:

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  3. Dr_Toad It's green! Valued Senior Member

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    Much ado about nothing.

    For one thing, why would anyone here (or anywhere except a professional site) need 10,000 characters to make a point?

    For another, if you need that much space, split the posts into chapters. Or publish a book...
     
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  5. Kittamaru Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Adieu, Sciforums. Valued Senior Member

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    T'would seem to be a problem only for those that engage in Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness or other forms of extraneous verbosity

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    I am reminded of a quote - A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Parsimony is only a challenge if one is capable of encountering its requirement. Oth'ise dunnamata.
     
  8. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    c? cd stl ct a slbl.
     

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