Storing Format-Specific Data

[Virgil Sovereign]

Attn: Chris and Other Devs

I've run into the following problem a few times.

I need to embed an element in outgoing post BBCode/HTML in such a way that both:

1. the element does not appear in the layout when the page is loaded, even when no scripts are run
   
2. Proboards' backend can convert the element between BBCode and HTML

The issue is that I need to store content in outgoing posts in such a way that if a post is quoted or edited, both the HTML (in the proboards.dataHash.visualHtml variable) and the BBCode (in the value of the text editor) contain appropriately-translated versions of the content, but the content must not be present in the layout of the published post.

Ordinarily I would use keys or embedded <font size="URL-encoded-content"></font> tags, but these are not converted by Proboards' backend. At best, they require an AJAX call or primitive translation when the post is being loaded into the editor in a format different from the one in which it was saved.

Ideally, it would be nice if the Proboards HTML-BBCode parser/translator permitted the style="display:none;" attribute for divs.

Is this doable?

Is there another workaround I'm missing?

Many thanks for any help or assistance you can provide.

[Peter]

Can you not use a span or div and use the title attribute to store your data in?

[span title="hello world"][/span]

[Virgil Sovereign]

Dec 27, 2015 16:52:40 GMT -8 Peter said:

Can you not use a span or div and use the title attribute to store your data in?

[span title="hello world"][/span]

The data itself is arbitrary BBCode/HTML content. Generally speaking, it can't be stored in an attribute unencoded.

I could URL encode the data, but then Proboards' backend doesn't translate it.

[Peter]

Dec 27, 2015 16:55:42 GMT -8 Virgil Sovereign said:

Dec 27, 2015 16:52:40 GMT -8 Peter said:

Can you not use a span or div and use the title attribute to store your data in?

[span title="hello world"][/span]

The data itself is arbitrary BBCode/HTML content. Generally speaking, it can't be stored in an attribute unencoded.

I could URL encode the data, but then Proboards' backend doesn't translate it.

The problem you have is that the element holding on to that data will get converted into its HTML equivalent (span in this case), and the data stored in the attribute will get converted to its UBBC equivalent.  So you will need to convert them back when editing a post, or switching from BBC to visual.  Bit of a pain, but that's the only way around it if you want the backend to handle parsing.

[Chris]

The parser does not permit "display:none" but it does support setting width and height to 1px with an overflow of hidden.

Quote this post to see the hidden text below:

Dec 27, 2015 16:46:50 GMT -8 Virgil Sovereign said:

Attn: Chris and Other Devs

I've run into the following problem a few times.

I need to embed an element in outgoing post BBCode/HTML in such a way that both:

1. the element does not appear in the layout when the page is loaded, even when no scripts are run
   
2. Proboards' backend can convert the element between BBCode and HTML

The issue is that I need to store content in outgoing posts in such a way that if a post is quoted or edited, both the HTML (in the proboards.dataHash.visualHtml variable) and the BBCode (in the value of the text editor) contain appropriately-translated versions of the content, but the content must not be present in the layout of the published post.

Ordinarily I would use keys or embedded <font size="URL-encoded-content"></font> tags, but these are not converted by Proboards' backend. At best, they require an AJAX call or primitive translation when the post is being loaded into the editor in a format different from the one in which it was saved.

Ideally, it would be nice if the Proboards HTML-BBCode parser/translator permitted the style="display:none;" attribute for divs.

Is this doable?

Is there another workaround I'm missing?

Many thanks for any help or assistance you can provide.

[Virgil Sovereign]

Dec 27, 2015 17:15:51 GMT -8 Peter said:

Dec 27, 2015 16:55:42 GMT -8 Virgil Sovereign said:

The data itself is arbitrary BBCode/HTML content. Generally speaking, it can't be stored in an attribute unencoded.

I could URL encode the data, but then Proboards' backend doesn't translate it.

The problem you have is that the element holding on to that data will get converted into its HTML equivalent (span in this case), and the data stored in the attribute will get converted to its UBBC equivalent.  So you will need to convert them back when editing a post, or switching from BBC to visual.  Bit of a pain, but that's the only way around it if you want the backend to handle parsing.

Right. This thread is basically a request for a workaround or for the attribute I mentioned in the OP to lessen the pain.

"Bit of a pain" is actually "considerable pain" since the only solution I can see is to write my own crippled client-side HTML/BBCode validator/converter. The AJAX option is messy. It either requires an AJAX request to be fired off immediately before the post is submitted, and two URL-encoded versions of the content to be stored in the post. Or it requires firing off an AJAX request when the post is first loaded into the editor, which I believe technically breaks the developer guidelines. Either way, we have plugins firing off AJAX requests they really don't need to make.

The homebrew HTML/BBCode converter is doable, but at the very least this approach requires a plugin to "manually" strip anything potentially malicious out of BBCode/HTML, which takes no small bit of logic to do properly, and it won't properly convert elements like user links, quotes, videos, etc., because these all require information from the backend.

It would be vastly simpler if we had a style="display:none;" attribute to make use of. No AJAX calls. No crippled, XSS-attack-waiting-to-happen homebrew content validators/converters. No hackish empty tags with URL-encoded title attributes.

I admittedly don't know what the Proboards code base looks like, but I can't imagine that adding style="display:none;" to the list of allowable DIV attributes on the next build would take more than 20 minutes.

In any case, I'd appreciate it, for what that's worth.

[Virgil Sovereign]

Dec 27, 2015 17:43:51 GMT -8 Chris said:

The parser does not permit "display:none" but it does support setting width and height to 1px with an overflow of hidden.

Quote this post to see the hidden text below:

Dec 27, 2015 16:46:50 GMT -8 Virgil Sovereign said:

Attn: Chris and Other Devs

I've run into the following problem a few times.

I need to embed an element in outgoing post BBCode/HTML in such a way that both:

1. the element does not appear in the layout when the page is loaded, even when no scripts are run
   
2. Proboards' backend can convert the element between BBCode and HTML

The issue is that I need to store content in outgoing posts in such a way that if a post is quoted or edited, both the HTML (in the proboards.dataHash.visualHtml variable) and the BBCode (in the value of the text editor) contain appropriately-translated versions of the content, but the content must not be present in the layout of the published post.

Ordinarily I would use keys or embedded <font size="URL-encoded-content"></font> tags, but these are not converted by Proboards' backend. At best, they require an AJAX call or primitive translation when the post is being loaded into the editor in a format different from the one in which it was saved.

Ideally, it would be nice if the Proboards HTML-BBCode parser/translator permitted the style="display:none;" attribute for divs.

Is this doable?

Is there another workaround I'm missing?

Many thanks for any help or assistance you can provide.

Ha!

Good enough! Many thanks!

[Peter]

Virgil Sovereign ,

My bad. It seems I didn't fully understand what you were trying to do.


Edit:  Then again, maybe I did, and missed the simple solution lol.  *thumbs up to Chris*