Okay, I'll bite.
This ["] shows up from time to time, as in (Remembering the "Professional Iconoclast"). What does it mean?
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BigJimOkay, I'll bite. This ["] shows up from time to time, as in (Remembering the "Professional Iconoclast"). What does it mean?
What it means is the software the presents Thread Titles can't properly process special characters.
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It means that people who took money to code a Web site didn't earn all of it.
What you see is code that, in one version of 'markup language', puts a quotation mark in text (so that, for example, when "smart quotes" which curl one way at the beginning and the other way at the end are wanted instead of the regular 'straight' quote characters, they will display correctly.
When the page code is rendered by a browser, the markup code is supposed to produce the intended effect. When that doesn't happen, the browser faithfully displays the code characters as text. This sort of crap happens fairly often in the Bangalore-revised version of Yahoo Groups; the design team would plow ahead and "fix" one thing in the formatting, which would then break something else, and they finally gave up and decremented the whole thing.
One 'correct' way to do this is to perform multiple passes on a post or e-mail text, to determine if the signature of improperly-rendered code characters remains in the text, and revise them separately (perhaps according to a rule-based or contextually-aware engine) if found. But this is evidently too difficult a concept, or too old-fashioned an IxD precept, for the Arotz Maimons of this world. So until the revolution we just have to put up with it.
You'll see the same type of thing if a command-line commando like me uses the wrong bracket, ie [quote]words[/quote}. If I used the right brackets, it would look thus:
words
But it is a deficiency in the software the forum uses. Probably the most common thing we see is the mis-coded ampersand.
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