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PaperclipPerfector  5hr ago (text post)   147 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Hilarious excerpt from the URL Standard:

The application/x-www-form-urlencoded format is in many ways an aberrant monstrosity, the result of many years of implementation accidents and compromises leading to a set of requirements necessary for interoperability, but in no way representing good design practices. In particular, readers are cautioned to pay close attention to the twisted details involving repeated (and in some cases nested) conversions between character encodings and byte sequences. Unfortunately, the format is in widespread use due to the prevalence of HTML forms.

  • These two lines are real list items…

  • …using HTML's "li" element.

• These two lines are fake list items…

• …using HTML's "p" element.

Which is better?

  • Notice that, if you try to select the bullets preceding the real list items, you will fail. This is because the bullets are generated by CSS, not actually in the HTML. In contrast, the fake list items have real, selectable bullet characters that were typed manually.

  • On the other hand, the fake list items do not have the proper "listitem" accessibility role, while the real list items do. In the context of Markdown on this website, this problem cannot be fixed. In the context of raw HTML, it can be fixed by adding the role manually.

  • We can also consider parallelism. Every "section" element has a selectable "h" heading element. Shouldn't a list item's bullet character serve as an analogous pseudo-heading? The fake list items can satisfy this criterion if typed in raw HTML (not if filtered through Markdown), while the real list items cannot.

Yeah, many of the older browser standards are really bad. Lots of the newer stuff at least makes some vague attempt to be based on a semi-coherent theoretical model -- eg, the "new" CSS layout models like flex and grid are vastly superior to the older ones. But because browser standards are kind of like religious texts and are almost never deprecated, you end up in this wonky situation where you have to override the defaults on everything to get sane behavior because the default is to be compatible with whatever monstrosity some random guy came up with one afternoon in 1996. It also puts you in this horrible situation where all the low-entropy vocabulary is taken by the old, bad ideas, so doing the wrong thing is super convenient and easy, and doing the right thing is some arcane incantation that nobody can remember, e.g., the infamous "How do you center a div? Not with <center>!"

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