miscoded

the web is a hack

Slashdot runs out of slashes

Q: What's this?



A: It's what Slashdot looks like in Opera 11.50.

Q: Why is it broken?

A: Apparently they ran out of forward slashes during the work on the last update? Here's their HTML:

<a class="btn link slashtvico" href="http://tv.slashdot.org"><span>SlashTV<span></a>


The "SlashTV" link is supposed to be an icon and thus they use a quirky combination of styles to hide all the text inside it and display an image instead (this is a technique known as CSS image replacement).

Since they didn't close the tag properly, the pre-HTML5 parser thinks all remaining content on the page is inside the SPAN, and applies styling like text-indent: -999999px; to make all the text on the site disappear.

I wonder what their code will look like when they run out of dots too!

Debugging Maps. Google Maps.-o-unite-webkit-foo

Comments

Hallvord R. M. Steenhallvors Thursday, March 29, 2012 11:38:29 AM

I forgot to credit Yngve for the title of this blog post smile

Jimtoyotabedzrock Friday, March 30, 2012 3:44:44 AM

Hallvord this is off topic but do you know if there is a fix for how Opera handles certain links in Google+?

It seems to break on handling relative URLs properly.

Charles SchlossChas4 Friday, March 30, 2012 3:55:17 AM

he he, who knows about /. in the Opera address bar?

type /. (then hit enter)

Robert Jacobsenrobertj Friday, March 30, 2012 8:51:16 AM

It seems to be fixed now!

nef ~$ wget -q -O - http://slashdot.org  | grep tvico
    <a class="btn link slashtvico" href="http://tv.slashdot.org"><span>SlashTV</span></a>

d4rkn1ght Friday, March 30, 2012 3:09:34 PM

Originally posted by robertj:

It seems to be fixed now!


nef ~$ wget -q -O - http://slashdot.org | grep tvico
<a class="btn link slashtvico" href="http://tv.slashdot.org"><span>SlashTV</span></a>

cool up

Rafael Luikrafaelluik Sunday, April 1, 2012 1:48:37 AM

Originally posted by Chas4:

type /. (then hit enter)

eek

Michael A. Puls IIburnout426 Sunday, April 1, 2012 4:03:39 AM

Originally posted by rafaelluik:

type /. (then hit enter)

Funny. I recently used that. I don't visit slashdot very often and had forgotten whether it was .org or .com. So, I just typed /. and pressed enter.

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