Question thread #3

[pauamma]

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer.

Comments

[chagrined]

I am only newly poking at the DW code and am new to most of this. I don't have enough understanding yet to ask interesting questions. But here is an uninteresting question I have about something!

In cgi-bin/bml/scheme/global.look, this is line 171:
GRIN=>{S}<grin>

Does that actually serve a purpose somewhere? It seems like all <?GRIN?> would do if used in a BML document is cause <grin> to print, which then wouldn't show up to the user, but wouldn't do anything else either. Is this just a silly programming easter egg of some kind, or does this actually do something I'm not seeing? (I also did a rgrep and couldn't find <?GRIN?> occurring anywhere.) eta: Oh, wait. I'm realizing now it'd make &lt;grin&gt; print, not <grin>. So the user would indeed see <grin>, I guess?

[pauamma]

Yes, they would indeed see <grin>. Also, the .look files for the legacy (pre-TT) skins have that unpleasant wrinkle that they define in all-uppercase stuff that's then referenced in all-lowercase elsewhere. (I got burned by that one when trying to clean them up early on in DW's life, IIRC.) In this case, though, it lr ooks like it's really not used, UPPERCASE, lowercase, or mixEd CAsE. (And it was already present in the initial version of that file Brad checked in on LJ, so it's really old.

[chagrined]

Hum. Well if it's super old maybe long ago in LJ code it did serve a purpose, but now doesn't? Like idk maybe Brad had <grin> print out on some pages? That seems kind of silly. ;p

Also, it is very useful to know that about the case! I think I first searched for it in all-uppercase and then did a search with that "-i" non-case-sensitive option also just to be sure. :)

[alierak]

I would guess it predates LJ and is derived from something like IRC or Usenet slang. It would have been common at one time for people to type <grin> or <G> in a non-HTML chat environment, and they probably tried to do the same thing in early LJ comments. Unfortunately this theory is completely non-Googleable, so you'd probably have to find some ancient crusty netizens to ask about it.

[chagrined]

That makes sense! Hmmm, although I wonder how one could use that from a user's end. Maybe earlier LJ comments didn't parse HTML in entries/comments like they do now? (Heh, I just tested to see if posting or commenting <?GRIN?> now would do anything, but ...nope, alas.) XD