On: To Make Sassages​

[chanz]

Why does the recipe contain zero length characters? Like described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16754987

Screenshot taken with addon: https://i.imgur.com/rgG0tMb.png Screenshot taken without addon: https://i.imgur.com/BV3sxqP.png

The zero length character is also at the end of the title in this hacker news entry.

[jeffburka → chanz]

I think the recipe was copy/pasted from a transcription project, possibly this one: http://transcribe.folger.edu/

The zero width characters might be leftovers from the transcription process, marking disagreements or known spelling errors or something.

If you click into one of the books on that website, you can see options to mark stuff as "ex" or "unc", which explains the weird markup (<span class="ex">er</span>).

[fluxsauce → chanz]

There's some odd markup:

> <div>you cant p<span class="ex">er</span>​seve the suet from the meat</div>

It's also around a possible spelling error"? (preserve vs perseve)

[coroxout → fluxsauce]

The markup flags up abbreviations. I'm not quite clear on the distinctions between the different tags but it looks like "ex" is for expansions/excluded letters and "sl" is something to do with superscript letters, or thereabouts.

See here for more on early modern "secretary hand" abbreviations: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/ceres/ehoc/conventions.html#co...

[bch → fluxsauce]

I think “perseve” == perceive.

[simcop2387 → chanz]

What addon is that? I'm curious to see if other websites are doing that to me now.

EDIT: my bad, I assumed the earlier hn link there was about the discussion on fingerprinting with them.

[chanz → simcop2387]

Right now there is 'only' a chrome extension that I know of that just scans for zero-length-characters: https://github.com/chpmrc/zero-width-chrome-extension

For Firefox there is this extension that does search and replace based on regex (so you need to create the rule by yourself). https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/foxreplace/?src=...

Apply an autoload rule with these settings:

  Name: zero length replacement
  HTML: Output only
  URL: <entering no url matches all sites>
  Replace: (\uFEFF|\u200B|\u200C)
  Type: Regular expression
  With: <span style="background-color:#F00 !important">&#x1f633;</span>

[dalore → chanz]

Could it be to prevent copy paste? Or perhaps it was copy pasted from somewhere else with those as copy protection.