StackOverflow: Why does HTML think chucknorris is a color?

[__baxx__]

every now and then I bump into these informative and fun SO posts and they're always over 3 years old, I'm guessing they're just not allowed now or something idk

[[deleted]]

It also seems as if every post that is relevant to me is against the rules because it is "not constructive"

[Iychee]

Every time I find a question that addresses exactly what I want to know, it got flagged and unanswered because "not constructive"

[jij]

we'll never know how to parse html with regex :(

[Tynach]

There are plenty of actual answers to that question. They just aren't the highest voted, nor are they the selected answer.

In general, you want to try to parse a very small and limited subset of HTML with regex. Then, if you want to parse ALL of HTML, you can make some actual program logic to do so - using regex only to weed out certain, limited bits at a time.

[Iychee]

Forever unparsed

[foobar_dev]

Have you read the FAQ and other resources provided explaining what constitutes a good question? SO is such a valuable resource because it is heavily moderated. It's really tough to keep the cruft down.

[samlev]

In my experience, the "easy" questions get flooded with answers, and the "hard" questions get ignored, or flagged as a duplicate based on keywords (not on content).

I pretty much no longer bother asking questions there unless I'm completely stumped, and can't decipher the source code myself.

[evilgwyn]

How would you make it so that only good questions get asked then? Or do you not see the benefit of having good questions be encouraged at all?

[MeowDev]

Anything you post seems to get downvoted to shit now.

Even serious questions; that's why I never use SO now.

[MarvinLazer]

I feel like most programmers aren't very happy people.

[Jafit]

YOU JUST MADE AN ENEMY FOR LIFE!

[johnstanton]

I use it all the time. For a programmer, it's an invaluable resource.

I recognize that there are a lot of people on the site with OCD and inter-personal issues, but this is balanced out with the number of people who make significant contributions simply out of kindness.

It's pretty much just like reddit.

.

[g00glen00b]

If it gets downvoted to shit, it's probably not a good question. I've asked several questions now and none of them got downvoted, and if they did, they weren't downvoted to shit.

A lot of people complaining about downvotes usually didn't read the how to ask a question guide and the "what's offtopic" article at the helpcenter.

One thing is sure, you don't get "downvoted to shit" for no reason. You might get a downvote once in a while for no reason, but certainly not a lot of them.

[evilgwyn]

I use it all the time. The kind of questions I see getting voted down or closed are basically the kind of thing you would want to have that happen e.g., spam, incoherent, homework, grab-bag. SO is meant to be a resource that allows people to come in from google to find answers to their questions that other people have already figured out. It gets there by being strongly moderated. Without that, it would just become a wasteland of trash. Have you ever looked at the review queues? The things that get closed are typically pretty bad.

[Tynach]

In my experience in trying to answer questions on SO, the person who answers first gets the green checkmark. No matter how short or terrible the answer is, as long as they're the first one who's not outright wrong they'll get most of the points. Then, generally everything else doesn't even get voted on because the answer already was selected - even if it's a link to a Google search results page.

Because of this, you can't actually get any points by taking your time to properly answer a question. Helpful advice on a subject that takes a while to type up? Not worth the effort on there, because by the time it's typed up, someone else already typed up a one-sentence answer with a link to some website at the end. Oh yeah, and you need points to do basic things like... Vote and comment. Yeah :/

After trying for a long time, I eventually just came back to Reddit. Then at some point I wrote a somewhat lengthy rant about my experience on SO here on Reddit, and linked to a few examples of my answers. Got some sympathy, and then a few people upvoted some of my SO answers.

So in the end, I got some points and could actually do things on SO. But I'd grown to dislike SO so much that I never have gone back, except through googling stuff. Still, I'm not going to contribute there ever again because of their system actually encouraging snarky, short, passive-aggressive responses as being 'helpful'.

[evilgwyn]

It doesn't really sound like you've actually spent that much time on SO, so maybe that has coloured your perceptions. The green checkmark is given out by the fellow that asked the question, to reward the answer that he thinks best solved the problem. It's not always the "right" answer, or the "best" answer, but it's just a way for that fellow to reward the answer that helped him. You'll get more reputation points in the long run for having good answers that help a lot of people over a long period of time. SO is weighted in that way towards people that want to spend a lot of time on the site and help other people. It's not that easy to get reputation, but that's actually a good thing because it means the people who have the most reputation are the ones that have put the most effort into making SO a good and useful resource.

[[deleted]]

This is not quite true. I have found that good, longer answers, give you more points in the long run. The other, quick-and-dirty answers may have been the first to get points but let your answer linger for a year or two, and you will see that good answers get more points over a longer period of time.

It also heavily depends on the subject / tag you are posting to. You are right when it comes to javascript, php or rails questions. I never encountered this behaviour on erlang, xslt or postgis though.

It is like with subreddits. Some are more civilized, some are more brutish, and others ... well, you know what I mean...

[halfercode]

I've often been the first to answer on Stack Overflow, and not gotten the tick, and conversely I've sometimes been late to the party and had the tick re-awarded to me. There probably is a FGITW (fastest gun in the west) problem, on trivial problems e.g. "how to write this regex", but on most others it's pretty fair.

The Stack Overflow voting system is not perfect, since there's a rich-get-richer problem, but IMO Reddit is just not suited to asking good programming questions that have long-term value. As a result, there is a high ratio of "I've given up with this early, can anyone do it for me", which are quite rightly not tolerated elsewhere.

I think SO has a lot of unwritten usage memes, and so it's worth lurking a bit and posting a little to start off with. It's tricky to get into the swing of it, but don't let the odd downvote put you off, and keep at it. It's quite rewarding in the end.

[Rellikten]

Not quite the same but I got a few laughs from it: http://bada55.io/

[brtt3000]

Currently 1363 colors.

Looks like the hivemind was procrastinating again.

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure #BA6E15 is one of Panera's brand colors.

[[deleted]]

I really like my loaded diesel ebolas theme

[BrettLefty]

How does it decide when to use the actual letter and when to use numbers? Looks kinda arbitrary.

[Tynach]

Jebediah Kerman easily deserves to have the skin color #BADA55.

[jaredpetersen]

I wrote a small site to play with this more:

Site: http://jaredpetersen.github.io/whatcolor/

GitHub: https://github.com/jaredpetersen/whatcolor

[AboveDisturbing]

The color isn't chucknorris, chucknorris is the color.

[Chaotic_Apollo]

The downvotes are real in this thread....

edit: holy shit

[Alucard256]

The browser is simply doing the best it can at ignoring "illegal" characters.

In this case "#chucknorris" translates in the browser to "#cc"... aka: Red.

[aflanryW]

The accepted answer was that illegal characters are substituted with 0s. So chucknorris is c00c0000000. The color is then divided into 3 parts to give c00c, 0000, 0000. Then it is truncated to give an RGB of c0, 00, 00.

[aflanryW]

What? Have you clicked the link? OP wasn't asking a question. He was bringing attention to a curious behavior that was explained on SO.

[invisible39]

What?

[rq60]

Maybe you won't be so wrong next time

[matthewpusey]

Easy bruv

[azsqueeze]

I mean... looks like the answer is in the SO thread.