Check out Sam Ruby’s latest... but only in a browser. His use of <plaintext>, which turns out to be an obsolete HTML tag (I’d never seen it, and I’ve been doing this shit since 1994), has exploded Bloglines (no biggie, Bloglines is basically unmaintained these days) and demolished PlanetApache (scroll down a bit). PlanetJava has silent data loss, and del.icio.us is barfing angle-brackets. It’s only a matter of hours before the Web Implodes, Wall Street Crashes, and mobs of looters take apart downtown Topeka, Kansas. Stock up on dried foods. [Update: Lauren points out that <plaintext> is defined, but deprecated, in the HTML RFC from 1995. How many more scary forgotten tags are lurking in the codebase, I wonder?] [Update: You might want to go back to Sam’s post and read the comments, which are instructive and entertaining.]


author · Dad
colophon · rights
picture of the day
March 28, 2006
· Technology (90 fragments)
· · Web (396 more)

By .

The opinions expressed here
are my own, and no other party
necessarily agrees with them.

A full disclosure of my
professional interests is
on the author page.

I’m on Mastodon!