Replies on blog don't show HTML videos

Not sure if this is a Micro.blog problem, a theme problem (I’m using a customized version of the official Hello theme), or what. But I noticed today that replies on my Replies page don’t show an included HTML video. Example: https://jb.heydingus.net/replies/2023/11/19/26643783.html

Oh, it’s not showing in the conversation view of the main post either.

Some html (embeds in particular) are filtered in the timelines. And video posting I bet specifically is filtered out since hosting video is a MB premium feature.

As @jsonbecker mentioned already, only a subset of HTML is allowed on the timeline. For some reason, intentional or not, original posts and replies are treated differently. A cute little quirk is that if you edit that reply, the video will show up. :blush: You only have 24 hours to edit a reply, though.

Hmm. By my understanding of that page, a <video> tag should be displayed both in the timeline and on my blog. I’ve edited the reply to fix that particular post, but I’m still confused about why it would be interpreted as raw text rather than the HTML video tag.

That page describes posts but does not explicitly mention replies. Replies are treated differently, and I don’t know whether that’s @manton’s intention or not. With the edit reply workaround, though, they mostly work like original blog posts.

My guess is that Manton considers the fact that we can have videos and other HTML in replies a bug, based on what he writes in his book:

I also liked that replies were simple, usually short and without images, because it makes the timeline much more readable.

Yes, I strongly suspect this is similar to why images and gifs are not “technically” permitted in replies, though using HTML will work.

Now, Markdown also works in replies

Some more background on this… Early on in Micro.blog I noticed that people would use “<” in replies and it could get confusing whether that was supposed to be an HTML tag. Because replies were intended to just be simple text and Markdown, we started escaping “<”. We’ve slowly been making replies and posts more consistent, but they are still pretty different. I think the next step is to only escape “<” when it’s obviously not part of an HTML tag, e.g. <h1> is a tag but “3 < 5” is not.

Long-term, I intend to formalize Micro.blog’s formatting as “Micro.blog-flavored Markdown”, to include some of the additions like auto-linking URLs and usernames (and poetry- and Wordle-compatible new lines), and then apply that change everywhere. Might take a little while to get to that point.

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Thanks for the background! I like the idea of that direction and understand it’ll take time and is probably not a priority. For now, it seems like the best thing to do is use the special stuff sparingly in replies, and if I see an issue then edit/save to get it to display properly. From my understanding, that won’t always propagate across to people following on Mastodon, but is workable for now.

I have a change almost ready to deploy that improves how edits are synced back to Mastodon. So that should be working better soon.

Oh man, that’s amazing! :clap: