So, some time ago I changed quote tags to use whitespace trimming, so that I could precisely style the space between quotes and surrounding text.
Turned out that it didn't work very well.
The first problem was with margins. I used margin collapsing to allow for an opener quote not to take any useless space at the top of a post, but if you quoted that, it would add the extra space inside the new quote. I fixed it this morning by adding an extra div directly above the blockquote tag. I fought long and hard against that (even trying for pseudo-elements to fill in the gap...), until I realized I'd provisioned for an empty <footer> tag in the markup. So I simply removed the footer tag (which can very well be 'emulated' through pseudo-elements, like .bbc_quote:after, well, maybe not, but it can always be re-inserted by a plugin through a SQL query), and replaced them with the div tags. 'div' is shorter than 'footer', and it's acceptable. (Heck, I'm even considering turning <div class="bbc_quote"> into <section class="bbc_quote"> because of the header, but whatever...)
So, problem solved.
Now, there's an extra problem. The trimming code.
Let's say you have some text, then a few empty lines, then a quote, then a few empty lines, then some text.
Wedge (and SMF, I guess) will only remove the TRAILING empty lines. Any empty lines BEFORE the quote tag are left as is.
I was wondering why, and it turned out that... Well, it seems that these are never even looked against...?!
So, quotes are set to trim 'outside', to me that means "before and after the tag"...
But it seems that the two 'outside' trimming code blocks are both about 'anything coming after the tag'.
And if anything -- the regexps both start with '^' and have no closer '$', which doesn mean "look for whitespace at the beginning of the string...", when we should have at some point a test against whitespace soming before the tag, i.e. a test against substr($message, 0, $pos) (with $pos representing the start of a tag, and a regexp ending with $), instead of substr($message, $pos), with $pos representing the end of the tag and the regexp starting with ^, like it is now...
Do you think it's an oversight? In SMF, 'outside' is only used on 'td' and 'li'. I can understand that one would want to only test for whitespace once because if anything, there's little chance of having any text between two td or li tags, so if you test for trailing whitespace, you don't need to test for leading whitespace on the next tag because it's likely to have been removed already... Yet, it isn't working that way in my opinion.
Maybe I should add support for a new trimming codeword that would cover both directions... I don't know.
Anyone here knows about everything I've been talking about...?
Turned out that it didn't work very well.
The first problem was with margins. I used margin collapsing to allow for an opener quote not to take any useless space at the top of a post, but if you quoted that, it would add the extra space inside the new quote. I fixed it this morning by adding an extra div directly above the blockquote tag. I fought long and hard against that (even trying for pseudo-elements to fill in the gap...), until I realized I'd provisioned for an empty <footer> tag in the markup. So I simply removed the footer tag (which can very well be 'emulated' through pseudo-elements, like .bbc_quote:after, well, maybe not, but it can always be re-inserted by a plugin through a SQL query), and replaced them with the div tags. 'div' is shorter than 'footer', and it's acceptable. (Heck, I'm even considering turning <div class="bbc_quote"> into <section class="bbc_quote"> because of the header, but whatever...)
So, problem solved.
Now, there's an extra problem. The trimming code.
Let's say you have some text, then a few empty lines, then a quote, then a few empty lines, then some text.
Wedge (and SMF, I guess) will only remove the TRAILING empty lines. Any empty lines BEFORE the quote tag are left as is.
I was wondering why, and it turned out that... Well, it seems that these are never even looked against...?!
So, quotes are set to trim 'outside', to me that means "before and after the tag"...
But it seems that the two 'outside' trimming code blocks are both about 'anything coming after the tag'.
And if anything -- the regexps both start with '^' and have no closer '$', which doesn mean "look for whitespace at the beginning of the string...", when we should have at some point a test against whitespace soming before the tag, i.e. a test against substr($message, 0, $pos) (with $pos representing the start of a tag, and a regexp ending with $), instead of substr($message, $pos), with $pos representing the end of the tag and the regexp starting with ^, like it is now...
Do you think it's an oversight? In SMF, 'outside' is only used on 'td' and 'li'. I can understand that one would want to only test for whitespace once because if anything, there's little chance of having any text between two td or li tags, so if you test for trailing whitespace, you don't need to test for leading whitespace on the next tag because it's likely to have been removed already... Yet, it isn't working that way in my opinion.
Maybe I should add support for a new trimming codeword that would cover both directions... I don't know.
Anyone here knows about everything I've been talking about...?
