Wordyard

Hand-forged posts since 2002

Scott Rosenberg

  • About
  • Greatest hits
  • 
  • 
  • 
  • 

Archives

Wordyard / Dreaming in Code / Leaking entities

Leaking entities

March 8, 2007 by Scott Rosenberg 1 Comment

Today’s software is built up in layers, like sedimentary rock that has been accumulating over many generations. In Dreaming in Code I wrote about how sometimes the lower layers poke up through the surface, like angled strata of rock, disturbing the placid interface surface. (This was merely a metaphoric restatement of Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions.)

Examples of this are all over the place. This morning, for instance, I went to have a look at the new beta of My Yahoo (here’s the TechCrunch report). And here’s what I saw at the top of the page:

Notice the center button. This is, of course, an HTML code or “entity” representing the “non-breaking space”, and it is rearing its ugly little head onto the shiny new AJAX-y fresh My Yahoo screen.

Presumably some designer or developer entered that data long ago, maybe long before anyone ever thought it would end up labeling a button in this environment. Or maybe it was coded consciously that way with the expectation that the HTML data, including the non-breaking space code, would be transformed by the My Yahoo application in such a way that each layer would understand that it was looking at an HTML entity and handle it properly. However it happened, the bug exposes a layer of the software you were never supposed to see.

It’s a tiny bug, to be sure, on the first day of a public beta. It will probably be gone soon. But such “entity” codes have made their way often enough over the years onto Salon’s home page — so I find it a little reassuring that these things happen even to the experienced and well-staffed team at Yahoo.

Post Revisions:

There are no revisions for this post.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • Print

Filed Under: Dreaming in Code, Software, Technology

REPORT AN ERROR

Get Scott’s weekly Wordyard email

Notes from me and the week's collection of links and quotes. No spam, and if I ever sell this list or send you a "sponsored email" you'll know that I'm gone and some alien has adopted my identity.

Comments

  1. Firas

    March 9, 2007 at 6:59 pm

    Interestingly enough it’s even worse than that—rather than seeing something that wasn’t supposed to show through, you’re seeing something that *was* supposed to be directly delivered, intercepted by mistake. If the entity was just sent to the browser, it’d show up as a space, but something escaped it midstream (turning the & character into an ampersand entity, thus making the ‘nbsp;’ part mean nothing to the browser).

Post a comment Cancel reply

Creative Commons License Wordyard by Scott Rosenberg is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.