Lost in translation
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Ok, this one turned out to be a little weak, but I decided to post it anyway.
I was wanting to translate a German web page to English, so I went to babelfish.altavista.com. There was an error alert, illustrated below:
At first I thought, "WTF?! It can't translate a German website because it ends in .de?"
As it turns out, though, it was choking on the final period in the anchor at the end of the link. Not quite as sexy for a WTF. Still, though... Does anyone know off the top of their head if periods are technically allowed in anchors?
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@R.Flowers said:
As it turns out, though, it was choking on the final period in the anchor at the end of the link. Not quite as sexy for a WTF. Still, though... Does anyone know off the top of their head if periods are technically allowed in anchors?
Yep.
@W3c said:ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").
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What is this treason? MSDN, and 4 Slashdot tabs?
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@Fred Foobar said:
What is this treason? MSDN, and 4 Slashdot tabs?
It has become my habit to open articles (whether they are in Slashdot, Digg, or what have you) from the main page, then go read each in turn. Slashdot happened to have a few stories that caught my interest today.
The MSDN article is this: http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/06/14/631438.aspx, regarding Vista's late ship date.
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They should really just truncate everything after the anchor anyway. They don't actually take advantage of it, do they?
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The real WTF is that somebody thinks Babblefish can "translate" anything.
"Vista will transport itself to the hour, which will be useful machine
translation, and will become the apes outside of my end to fly."
(Which should say "Vista will be released on time, machine translation will be useful"... and I'm sure you can finish it for yourself.)
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@Iago said:
The real WTF is that somebody thinks Babblefish can "translate" anything.
"Vista will transport itself to the hour, which will be useful machine
translation, and will become the apes outside of my end to fly."
(Which should say "Vista will be released on time, machine translation will be useful"... and I'm sure you can finish it for yourself.)
What's the source text, to be translated?var tldClip = urlField.substr(urlField.lastIndexOf('.'));
if (tldClip.length <= 1)
alert('You are missing the top-level domain!');
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The real WTF is that slashes are not allowed in domain names, so it should have been obvious to the parser that the first slash divides the domain from the resource URI; then it doesn't matter how many periods are at the end.
-dZ.
