Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by quarterto | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

quarterto

Wow. I haven't seen a <font> tag in years. My thought processes loading this:

• Ok, that is in fact green.

• I wonder if this is related to the colour name parsing weirdness that was on HN a couple of weeks ago?

• Heeeey, those aren't ASCII quotes!

View on HN

> I wonder if this is related to the colour name parsing weirdness that was on HN a couple of weeks ago?

Exactly my first thought. This is one of the main reasons I frequent this site - I have tons of random tidbits like this cached in my head, so around half of the times someone introduces a problem to me, I am known to reply: "you know, X months back there was a post on Hacker News...".

Maybe something is wrong with me, but the first thing I noticed was the quotes. In fact, from the title posted on HN.

Same here.

Me too. I thought "can't be that, too easy", so I looked for another mistake.

I'd like to ask everyone saying "I saw the quotes right away," what OS do you use? Perhaps your OS uses a different font.

I've had bugs in websites where menus would be completely messed up because they didn't fit in their given space, just because the font of choice was not available on Linux and it fell back on something slightly larger.

Edit: Though in the HN title it is much clearer than in the jsfiddle, for me anyway. Might that be it?

I'm using Chrome on OSX and the color value was highlighted red in the source, so I immediately looked at that.

Chrome on Windows and Linux, on HN and jsFiddle, the quotes were very obvious to me.

Green - with ascii quotes and an invisible seperator. http://jsfiddle.net/WGSNX/264/

Maybe it's just late at night, but how does this work? I understand the words "invisible separator", but for lack of better phrasing, I don't see an invisible separator.

Between the r and the e there is a U+2063 "invisible separator"

Ahh, thanks, that's the actual name of the character! 3am and I've already learned something new for the day.

Between the R and E of red there's some extra character.

My font shows it as a missing character box.

I'm guessing that it just breaks the 'red' into a value which is interpreted as whatever the hex is. (See the chuck norris links posted in this thread).

Red text in source code

http://jsfiddle.net/A6TQK/

   Wow. I haven't seen a <font> tag in years

You should check out the source code for HN more often. :)

Personally, I try to avoid looking at it. It reminds me too much of late 90's Geocities HTML.

   <blink>But pg made it!</blink>

<marquee>Awesome sauce!</marquee>

I made stuff with font tags too ... in 1995.

I think I still did, in an html email, recently :(

Had exactly the same Heeeey moment :)

_with_ ascii quotes, it works (it's red)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com