Talk:Faux HTML Tags

Also known as Ostensible Markup Language [dead link], although it's not the only meaning of that phrase.

On the page, that sentence includes a link that doesn't exist either on the live Web or in the Wayback Machine.

And a DuckDuckGo search only turns up one mention of the phrase, at acronymattic.com - which is not the most reliable source.

Should we simply delete the sentence?

@Umbire the Phantom @Ilikecomputers

If we can't source it via any reliable means, yes.

If we can't find a source for it, we can't validate the claim, therefore I vote yes.

EDIT:

After some further research I think the person who edited it meant to say 'eXtensible Markup Language'. If my limited understanding of XML is correct, it introduces some new tags to allow it to go beyond a regular markup language, but still uses the fundamental structure of regular HTML. Therefore, some faux HTML tags may be actual XML tags.

https://csrc.nist.gov/glossary/term/eXtensible_Markup_Language

https://www.w3.org/XML/

Retracting my 'yes' vote and voting to replace the sentence with "Sometimes, the usage of these tags may actually be legitimate, in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML eXtensible Markup Language]]"

No, as the person who added that link back on TVT, it very much wasn't a mistake for "extensible". There used to be an entire mock specification for OML at that URL, which as Rob notes below was named as a joke.

Don't be quite so fast to assume an error or ignorance on the part of another contributor if you don't understand a reference or joke.

That said, given the usage of "Ostensible Markup Language" doesn't seem to have lasted more than a few years, and the spec is long gone, there's no real point in keeping the sentence.

Ah, thanks for the clarification. I couldn't find any evidence for its existence, which is why I came to the conclusion so fast. With nothing on the internet archive, and the web link being long down, there isn't any evidence for the existence for OML, leading to my assumptions.

Ah, that makes a lot of sense then.

I was thinking that the phrase was intended to be a pun, but given the dictionary meaning of "ostensible " it's a weak pun at best.

I think that deleting the pun to explain XML would make it easier and clearer to understand the article. Faux HTML Tags does require some explanation to what HTML is in the first place, and I don't think a pun helps in this explanation; readers might look up the non existent "ostensible markup language" instead of "extensible markup language". My proposal remains unchanged.

I agree with ILC here.

Clarity is more important than wit - it says so in the Style Guide.

Let's replace the line.

While we're here, recently I've made an edit to the page to try to tidy it up a bit. The most significant change is that I started a dedicated examples section. I'm now questioning my decision to do this; the article is classified as useful notes and thus should have no examples (I think). Can someone (thanks in advance to that someone) please check that the edit is alright?

classified as useful notes and thus should have no examples (I think)

Is that a TV Tropes thing? I don't remember seeing it anywhere in the policies here (and it definitely isn't in any of the policies that I wrote).

Directly from their Useful Notes page:

Useful notes on a variety of subjects, the purpose of which is threefold:

1. To debunk common media stereotypes.
2. To help you understand some media better.
3. To inform (and sometimes entertain) about subjects common in storytelling.

Every specialized wiki will accumulate useful notes like these as it grows. Note, however, that this is not supposed to be an index of everything that exists in the real world — that is the purview of Wikipedia. We are a site about media and storytelling. As a rule of thumb, items to be added should either be commonly featured in media, or related to its creation and distribution in some way.

Useful Notes articles are not tropes and are not to be included in a work's trope list. Similarly, tropes are not to be used to describe the subject of a Useful Notes article directly. You may, however, list tropes that are commonly found in media portraying the subject.

In short, whether or not they list examples on the page varies with the type of Useful Note in question, I'd imagine - at minimum where we're concerned, I can't exactly see any harm if we were to do so for this.

Thanks, Umbrie. This Mod was wrong.

No worries - I was gonna suggest Veganism and Vegetarianism as a point of reference next if either of you needed it. :B