One small problem I’ve had is what one client described as a “momentary flash of vertical text while loading”. It took me quite some time to work out what was happening, but today I finally tracked it down to an issue with the auto-generated critical CSS; a ::before pseudo-element has a character specified using a CSS entity code, which is partially(?) being replaced with HTML in the critical CSS. The HTML doesn’t render as the expected character (it looks malformed to me), causing a moment before the async CSS loads where the extra characters are displayed instead.

This screenshot shows a comparison between the source (as loaded asynchronously) and the inline critical CSS. You can see the correct value, CSS entity \00a0, in the async section at the top (though disabled in my screenshot because I was testing), and the erroneous value <meta charset="UTF-8" />a0, in the inline section below.

Alternatively this might be a HTML optimisation issue? I don’t know whether it’s happening when the critical CSS is generated, or during HTML optimisation. I do know that turning off HTML minification doesn’t help.

I’m putting a workaround in place for now, but it would be good to know if this is something in the plugin that could be addressed. Thanks!

NB: I haven’t supplied the URL due to client privacy. I’m happy to open a private support ticket if you need me to provide more information or link the actual site.

I’m seeing a lot of &#8211 and other character codes in the meta description and titles etc. when I view the page source.

Is that correct? I did not see this before with other SEO plugins.

Secondly, is there a place to enter SEO keyword like in Yoast or how does the plugin deal with this?

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/autodescription/

https://www.pasadosafehaven.org/adopt/farm/#petid-32321949

vs. his actual Petfinder profile:

https://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/32321949

It’s not a font issue, but rather the text is being inserted by the plugin without using the appropriate HTML character codes.

If anybody knows a of a quick fix for this, let me know. Otherwise, a plugin update to resolve this would be fantastic!

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/petfinder-listings/

I’m struggling to get WP to output literal HTML special characters. The most bizarre thing is that it seems to actively decode properly escaped characters. Take the following example:

function test_htmlspecialchars($content){
    return htmlspecialchars('<a href="#">Link</a>');
}
add_action('the_content','test_htmlspecialchars');

The filter should replace the_content() with escaped special characters, which, in the browser, should render as copy/paste friendly html. Weirdly, however, it seems that WP is taking the character codes like ‘-&-l-t-; (hyphens added to hack the forum) and decoding them, resulting in a literal ‘<‘ character.

Does anyone know how to keep this from happening? I’ve experimented with everything I can find–wpautop, hooks, actions, bla bla bla–and I can’t seem to lick this thing. Any help greatly appreciated!

EDIT: HA! Irony of ironies, publishing this very post (here on www.ads-software.com) just automatically converted my special characters to literal html. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills! Edited the code above, adding the “htmlspecialchars” function since I can’t get it to display the character codes inline

I am currently very annoyed with WordPress because of two things:

1. WordPress removes whitespace. For example, I press enter 3 times to keep a spacer so that my posts don’t get too crowded and since WP 3.3 it just removes ALL of them.
2. WordPress replaces all of my < and > with the their HTML character codes (“&lt”) and replaces my line breaks (in code) with “br”. I’m using SyntaxHighlighter Evolved and it doesn’t parse these codes as their characters so my code looks like this:

&lt?php<br \>echo "example";<br \>?&gt
(I removed the “;” on purpose)

PLEASE PLEASE HELP!!! It’s killing me!

Character #8230 is a horizontal ellipsis but I just want the normal three dots. I’d like to ask, is there a way to prevent this without writing PHP script to alter the output of the_content()? I mean, can this be helped with a setting or another simple change?