Links keep disappearing
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Essentially it works that way because the software interprets everything inside curly brackets as “not part of a link” so it deletes it.
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@bangkokherps: The problem is that you’re confusing code with text. Code is not text just because you can prepare it in a word processor: code uses specific symbols for specific functions. Any wrong symbol renders the code invalid, so the code will either not work or get stripped. For example, if you want to make the text of a paragraph larger and orange, you’ll write this:
<p style="font-size:120%;color:#f50;">TEXT HERE</p>
You might prefer using square brackets, or write par instead of p, or use a comma or an ambersand instead of a semicolon between the two commands, or write font size instead of font-size, or whatever. None of this will do, because it’s not up to you to decide what you prefer: code is a standardized language you need to learn and observe.Re the quotation mark in particular, you can simply change the preferences of your (equally stupid) word processor so it produces a straight qm when you type a qm.
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panaghiotisadam – No, the problem is that my problem has consistently been misinterpreted by people who think they have the answer and want to reinterpret my question so that their answer will fit. Making condescending comments about what code is doesn’t help me or you. I was paid to code more than a decade ago. My question isn’t about code in general – it’s about the utility of a specific action of this specific program.
My question goes back to your statement here:
“Any wrong symbol renders the code invalid, so the code will either not work or get stripped.”
Okay, why is the “or” there? What possible utility is there for stripping out lines that I have typed in, rather than just having the code fail to work? Why should any input be stripped at any point?
Perhaps I can ask it another way.
1) When would you ever want to purposely place the curly quotation mark so that it will strip out lines? Would that ever be a useful function?
2) If there’s no reason for it to occur on purpose, then what is the unavoidable attribute of curly quotation marks that force text to be stripped when they occur? How is this functional within the code?
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Thanks raincoaster. Can you explain why the software would interpret it this way? Is there utility to deleting text within the curly quotation marks?
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All code that you put into wordpress posts, pages and widgets is checked before the post is saved or published. If the code is wrong, there is a possibility that if you were allowed to publish it, it would break your site here. There was a bunch of that that went on in the past and we volunteers here in the forums spent many, many hours trying to help users straighten that stuff out. HTML is standardized, and anything written that does not keep to those standards can cause a web page to break.
It is best to put in all of your text, including the text that you want to use for links, and then use the link facility in the visual editor to link the different bits of text. This will keep this issue from happening in the future.
Also, go to settings > writing and select “WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” and then click “save changes.” WordPress should then automatically fix most errant HTML errors for you.
And if you are going to write your own code, never ever use a word processor such as MS Word. They use different ASCII character codes for things like colons, forward slashes, double and single quote marks and the opening and closing angle brackets and the web will not recognize those characters as HTML and the code will not work.
Use a text editor such as Notepad if you are on Windows, or TextEdit if on Mac and makes sure they are set for plain text and not for RTF (rich text format).
The other thing you might consider if you are on Windows is Windows Live Writer, which is a free blog client software package and is very MS Word-like. It produces very solid HTML and you will not have any issues such as what you are experiencing, and you can actually publish your posts directly to your blog right from WLW.
If you are on Mac, there is Ecto, which is not free, but at around $20, it is more than reasonable.
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If you were “paid to code” but couldn’t tell why your links wouldn’t work, then we’re not to blame if you consider our replies “condescending”.
Your original question was why some of your links disappear. When we solved that, you continued to complain, although it’s not our job to apologize if the editor doesn’t work the way you’d like it to or if you’re not using your tools carefully.
So:
“Is there utility to deleting text within the curly quotation marks?”
“Why can’t it just leave in text it doesn’t recognize?”First, I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss about this: since the code wouldn’t work anyway, what difference would it make to you if it stays or goes? Second, as I already said, you’re confusing text with code (so the one who’s misinterpreting things is you). No, there’s no utility that deletes text within the curly quotation marks: what’s deleted in a link code with curly qms is the whole href attribute, because you can’t have a curly qm in there. And no, the editor doesn’t strip out text it doesn’t recognize: it strips out code it recognizes perfectly well as wrong code. Because of the reason TSP explained, and because garbage and bad coding is a factor search engines take into account.
You can continue complaining about the editor (or us) here:
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Oh and by the way, both Windows Live Writer and Ecto will strip out bad code if you put it in manually also, or send up a big warning that you have bad code and either require you to fix it before publishing, or you can have the program try on its own to fix your code. Sometimes they do alright fixing code, and sometimes they do no. It’s a roll of the dice.
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