#4298 Palm interface creating malformed HTML

[Adrian]

Certain slashdot articles, when viewed through the Palm interface (http://slashdot.org/palm) create malformed HTML. An example can be found at http://slashdot.org/palm/14/09/01/16/1347230_1.shtml; there is a link just before the "Next Page" link that is never closed. Depending on the browser, some (most desktop browsers) will tidy this automatically and make the subsequent links (Next Page, next/previous story etc) work properly, whereas some (most mobile browsers) will not tidy this, and all links will be treated as one, malformed link. As this interface in intended for mobile browsers, this can be a large problem, causing it to be impossible to check the full summary, or view the comments, for affected stories.

The problem appears to be that the code which splits long summaries into multiple smaller pages assumes that all the text in the summary will be plain text, when sometimes it is html code. The solution would seem to be to have the code that decides where to split the summary to not count html code, or to check if the split is within a link and if so, move the link before it.

I don't know if this is a slash issue or a specific slashdot one, but I have had this issue for at least 5 years across at least 3 different kinds of mobile device (Windows Mobile, Palm OS, and currently Blackberry).