Don’t be so literal on Christmas
December 18, 2006 – 4:45 pmToday we received a holiday ham sent to us through Heavenly Ham by family members in Texas. The delivery guy handed me a small card with our family members’ greeting hand-written on it by somebody at HeavenlyHam.com. When I saw the following, I immediately recognized that the card was transcribed from a web-based form:
Yes, it says “Chris & Critters”.
An explanation for those of you that don’t speak HTML:
In HTML, if you want to write “Bob & Nancy”, you can’t just write the “&” directly, because it has a special meaning to HTML: it begins a character entity reference. In your HTML source, you have to write it as: “Bob & Nancy”. The browser will show this as “Bob & Nancy“. Well, someone at HeavenlyHam.com had the tedious task of hand-writing all the Web-form-submitted holiday greetings to include in the shipments of delicious goodies. This unlucky person didn’t translate the “&” back to “&“. Which amused me immensely, because I: 1) am a web developer, and 2) am easily amused.
5 Responses to “Don’t be so literal on Christmas”
I’ve yet to see a browser that wont correctly render “Bob & Nancy”. as long as their is a space after the ampersand, they realize you’re not donig it right, and DWIM (do what I mean). I also believe that is the right decision on the browser-programmers.
By ClintJCL on Dec 19, 2006
that’s really funny, btw! was it an automated pen? a plotter + some software to introduce handwritting-like characteristics?
By ClintJCL on Dec 19, 2006
I doubt it was an automated pen. I think someone just saw “&” on the form text and transcribed it without thinking.
By doranchak on Dec 21, 2006
Or perhaps someone tried to paste html where html should not be? I don’t know C&C to make that call.
By ummm Clepto? on Dec 28, 2006
Woohoo! I made The Daily WTF!
By doranchak on Jan 4, 2007