How does this happen (even in the source code)? | Hacker News Reader

How does this happen (even in the source code)?

mrcalc.posterous.com

37 pointsmichaelkscott14 comments

Looks like a Thai character with stacked diacritics. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_alphabet#Diacritics)

It is Thai character (so suea, ส) with vowel (mai taikhu, -็) stacked together several times. In Mac OS X stacked vowels/tone markers will never appear beyond baseline[1][2] which is "correct" since we don't stack them vertically beyond 2 levels (vowel+tone marker, or 3 if you count the lower part); on Windows and maybe Linux it will appear stacked[2].

[1]: https://bug-25818-attachments.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=3...

[2]: http://i.imgur.com/Vtv7g.png

[3]: http://i.imgur.com/rtFVV.png

Very cool! And if you paste it an ASCII only text editor (notepad) and you'll see a huge blob at the end. You can actually left arrow through the entire stack of diacritics.

Zalgo generator: http://www.eeemo.net/

Is there any good way to support Unicode and user-submitted content, but prevent people from drawing "outside the lines," so that for example what happened to the HN front page because of this post doesn't happen?

I guess in any case when you have user-submitted content you have to have some way to deal with inappropriate content, but something like this just makes the site's interface appear broken.

overflow: hidden?

Ah, so there is something simple you can set. It would probably make sense for at least Google to set that attribute on their text fields if abuse of these diacritics continues to proliferate.

Well, it's actually a bit more complicated, because overflow: hidden doesn't play nicely with elements that change their size depending on how much content is inside them. But it could be part of an overall solution.

What is this, reddit?

Yeah, I thought it was going to be an actual bug in Google. Turns out someone just posted some funny unicode in a Youtube comment? Rather disappointed that this is on the front page.

Unicode combining diacritics. There's no real limit to the combining and it makes some text layout engines make funny characters.

Perfect example of GIGO.

Drop some of those diacritic stacks into Twitter and check out the mayhem.

I wish I could take a screenshot on my Windows Phone news reader to show you what happened :-)

S̢͎̳̞̲͈̪̳̻ͮͩt̟̳̏ͬ̔͒̈́ͦ͠a̞̤̝̟ͫ̽̂̈́ͪ͐͘n͕͐͑ͪ͐ͦ͋ͮ̅d͚̗̙̎ͫ̌â̗̬͓͍͍̳̥͆̕͠r̢̘ͣ̀d̢̢̢̘̲̺͙̂̈́̊ͬ ͎͎̫͚̣̺̤̖͊̏̀ͬ͞u̧͆ͩ́͒҉͔̠̪̖̹̠̰͎ṇ̸̛͚̟̫͎̟̣̜͋̈́ͧͯi̲̲̺͑̐ͣ͗̿̕͘͝c̦͈͇̦͈ͦ̆ͨ͝o̟̭̫̥͎̹͆́ͥ͊ͬ̏͝d̪͔̯̥̩͙̝ͩ̏͒̈́ͩ̿́̕͜ͅe͍͓̻̊͛ͅ ̸̧̻̺̤̠͙ͪ̋̽l̛̥̥ͬ͂̈́ͤ̓̀̓̚͘ͅͅͅǒ̮͓̼ͭ̂̆̇̕͘ͅl̯̯̟̗͔̳͉̰ͫ̒ͧͦͩͦ̓̓͢ͅs̝͎͚̗̮̟̒̔͛̈̊͋͒ͩͅ

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