HTML in messages

[phumphries]

Not sure that this is the right forum, but here goes...

When I cut and paste HTML into a message, I get a lot of extra space, seemingly due to extra <br> codes being inserted by vB at every line break. So, something like a table turns out horribly unless I go through and eliminate all the white space (spaces and carriage returns/line feeds). I would show you, but HTML is turned off in the Test forum.

Is there a way around this? I want my users to be able to cut and paste some pretty fancy HTML documents into their messages without having to ask me for help or get annoyed at having to do editing which makes future changes a real pain.

Peter E. Humphries

[Dave Baker]

I've seen this problem before with other Web page posting forms -- the only real trouble it's caused for me is the line breaks in tables -- when you have a "linefeed" at the end of a </TR> and before the next <TR> (i.e., the next <TR> starts on a new line inside the TEXTAREA input box) then vB (and most programs that accept input via a Web form) will assume the linebreak means you want to plug in a <BR> between the </TR> and the <TR> ... which results in a table with lots of <BR>s between the rows ... which usually causes the table to have a lot of blank space before it begins to be printed on the user's screen.

The solution is to scrunch the </tr> and the next <tr> up ... same thing with </td> and the next <td> ... the table basically should look like one long sentence in the TEXTAREA input box once those linefeeds have been deleted manually by the user after the table's been pasted into the TEXTAREA box from a word processor.

[phumphries]

Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately, I have a huge table that I want to update regularly as people reply to my thread. Fortunately, however, I did find a programme called HTML Shrinker that does the job; I cut and paste from the resulting file. Perhaps I will hack in a vB code
to turn off special markup character handling for a section of a post.

Peter E. Humphries