Onebox embeds too much content when target page has malformed HTML

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A discussion about onebox embeds importing too much content from a target page with malformed HTML. twicedd reported the issue with a specific link and codinghorror recalled seeing this behavior before, attributing it to the target site’s invalid markup.

riking used the W3C validator to identify the errors, including a stray end tag. codinghorror suggested making onebox more tolerant of bad HTML. sam proposed using nokogiri to iron out the bad HTML and truncate it to a sane size.

The issue was eventually fixed by techAPJ via a commit to the onebox repository, and zogstrip confirmed the fix by sharing an updated onebox embed.

1

Hi,

I had an issue with the following link: Le charlatanisme de Galuel | ⊔Foundation

Put on a one-line, it almost imports the whole page. I think this is not a normal behaviour, isn’t it?

1 Like
2

This is indeed really weird, the preview of the onebox is completely different than the cooked version…

3

We have seen this before, it implies badly invalid markup on the target site which somehow confuses the oneboxer, that is what I recall.

4

So what should we do about it?

5

See if the target site passes html validation via the w3c validator, and if not, how many errors does it report?

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Error Line 1250, Column 113: Stray end tag a.

…s://fr.wordpress.com/?ref=lof">Build a website with WordPress.com</a></a></div>

Yep, that’ll mess up the document structure.

2 Likes
7

Not sure how to fix this. Can we make onebox more tolerant of screwed up HTML?

8

We can, nokogiri can iron out bad html and we can trucate it at some sort of sane size.

9

@techapj can you add this to your list?

3 Likes
10

This is now fixed via:

https://github.com/discourse/onebox/commit/1b8bef8f96a4353cdfa6bc67da87d6750d5d31bf

3 Likes
12

Here’s how it looks now :+1:

3 Likes