Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color? (2011)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8318911/why-does-html-think-chucknorris-is-a-color

by Techasura • 13 years ago

188 43 13 years ago

stackoverflow.com

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

Waning: Meta

What's the process by which a stack overflow question hits HN?

How does the OP

1. Wander into this question

2. Decide it's worth sharing

3. Decide to post on HN specifically?

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

The post is a year old, but received a lot of views/tags/upvotes so a stackoverflow "top threads" reader might be reading these in his or her downtime.

amavisca• 13 years ago

It was just posted on reddit for the 100th time (r/webdev)

ygra• 13 years ago

As for me, I often explore related questions if their title is interesting. I also follow a few people who post very good answers because they're usually a joy to read.

And sometimes I stumble over things I didn't yet know and find interesting. I posted one such case here once.

But that's just me.

DanBC• 13 years ago

4. Manage to avoid the HN dupe checker.

yuhong• 13 years ago

Noticed I added references to Netscape classic source code.

biot• 13 years ago

As Seen on HN™ https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=chuckn...

picomancer• 13 years ago

HTML is built around intentionally ignoring malformed input

To elaborate: In the very early days, HTML was often written by hand. Part of the early vision of the web was that anybody could write HTML and publish content.

It was thought that allowing malformed HTML to result in a completely blank page or an error message would be too unfriendly for less technical users.

In those early pre-CSS pre-JavaScript days, HTML was more like bbcode, Markdown, or RST today. It's interesting that AFAIK those languages don't have a notion of malformed input -- there is no movement to tighten the bolts on Markdown in the way that XHTML attempted to tighten the bolts on HTML.

sillysaurus2• 13 years ago

Surely "ye olden HTML days" aren't that far back that we should be talking about them in past tense?

I just had a conversation with an iPhone repair guy. He asked me to help him fix a centering problem in his website. So he pulled up the HTML, and it was just awful. Table-based layout, broken tags... But it worked, and I taught him about the <center> tag. He gave me a discount on my repair.

Malformed HTML input is still very much alive and well, and necessary for non-technical people.

nostrademons• 13 years ago

<center> is deprecated in HTML5. Unfortunately teaching him about margin: 0 auto and text-align: center might be a bit more complicated.

tragomaskhalos• 13 years ago

Let he who has not used table-based layout cast the first stone ...

mistercow2• 13 years ago

In the very early days, HTML was often written by hand

It's still often written by hand, but not generally by novices.

TazeTSchnitzel• 13 years ago

When I was younger I assumed pros used Dreamweaver.

Quite the opposite!

hnriot2• 13 years ago

I always write it by hand, still haven't found a tool that does it better.

blasdel• 13 years ago

there is no movement to tighten the bolts on Markdown

Oh but there was one, and it was desperately needed!

Gruber's original implementation was absolutely riddled with logical inconsistencies, outright bugs, and even an escaping vulnerability that was exploited by an XSS worm to self-replicate on Reddit.

This project originally started as a PHP transliteration of Gruber's pile of regexes, and it's early version history is a nice summary of all the warts as they were discovered (and never fixed upstream): http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/classic/#version-his...

zerr• 13 years ago

Who would argue otherwise?

tobyjsullivan• 13 years ago

This definitely corrects a misconception I've had for years.

When I first started writing HTML, I would set colours using the english colour names, for example color="red" or color="white" and this worked well for my needs.

However, I would always get an odd result when I tried to set the colour grey. Turns out, I didn't spell very well (I was pretty young at the time, though still spell atrociously).

And the colour would come out green. What?

I quickly realised my spelling error but wondered why things ended up green. I decided what was happening was that the interpreter read the colour name up until the first invalid character (in this case resulting in "gr"), then chose the closest match. Green would be before grey in alphabetical order and... voila!

I see now the solution was simply that gray was interpreted as 00 a0 00. Another life mystery solved!

oneeyedpigeon3• 13 years ago

Don't beat yourself up about it: 'gray' is a perfectly legitimate US-English variant of the British-English 'grey'. In fact, 'Gray' is actually correct according to the spec (I had to look it up, and remember making this very mistake in the old days, which makes sense given that I'm British) I have a vague recollection that the 'misspelling' was actually handled differently between browsers.

Amadou• 13 years ago

So, you are saying this is a gray area?

(somebody had to say it)

dhughes• 13 years ago

To me "gray" just seems wrong, grey feels right.

toupeira• 13 years ago

Yep, Firefox supported both spellings while IE displayed green for 'grey'.

minikites• 13 years ago

I've heard it described as, "gray is a color, grey is a colour"

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

Actually, in HTML, ‘grey’ is wrong, ‘gray’ is correct.

“There are several tones of grey available for use with HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as named colors, while 254 true greys are available by specification of a hex triplet for the RGB value. All are spelled gray, using the spelling grey can cause errors. This spelling was inherited from the X11 color list. Internet Explorer's Trident browser engine does not recognize grey and renders it green.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey#Grey_in_the_sciences.2C_na...

lemonberry• 13 years ago

I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons in the early 80's. The world you played in was Greyhawk. As a result, even though I'm from the US, that shade between black and white will always be grey.

samatman• 13 years ago

Not only that, my mother starts every morning with a cup of Earl Grey. I never had a chance!

Given the title of the "world's most popular novel", I'd count on this spelling becoming normative over time.

chris_wot• 13 years ago

I thought it was because Chuck Norris doesn't adhere to web standards - web standards adhere to him!

ftwinnovations• 13 years ago

Thank you! This was the only reason I clicked into the comments, and you delivered well.

aaron695• 13 years ago

Please remember Chuck Norris is a fundamentalist christian who doesn't like gays and is against evolution in schools.

If that's your belief system no problem.

If not perhaps rethink just how cool he and this whole meme is.

oneeyedpigeon3• 13 years ago

presumably against the teaching of evolution in schools ...

(good point, though - he's pretty much an anti-gay, gun-toting dick)

hnriot2• 13 years ago

I have always thought the meme was really saying the total opposite, by saying how cool he is was really making fun of him for the reasons you state.

mrknmc• 13 years ago

Similar to the Nancy bug: http://calculist.blogspot.co.uk/2006/02/nancy-typing.html

beat• 13 years ago

Of course Chuck Norris is a color. He just has more bits than other colors.

Why does HTML think “chucknorris” is a color? (2011)

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