Stack Overflow Cannot Format an Ordered List

Stackoverflow has sucked for a while

It was great when it came out: it filled the niche that was weirdly difficult to fill on the web.

“What’s the right answer to this question?”

Things changed, and by June 29, 2020 Stackoverflow wasn’t really the same, and resorted to pumping out blogspam that no one reads (as opposed to my “nonspam” that no one reads. “Artisanal nothing”)

You see, they can no longer format numbered lists: we forgot how to count past 1, and use the default features of HTML

I am not kidding

Here is the article in question. And just in case they fix their blog that no one reads, here’s a screenshot of the bug.

How embarrassing.

This is one of the first success stories of the old internet, and they don’t know how to make a list count up.

Why Stackoverflow Can’t Make a List go up?

This is actually an automatic feature of html, so if you go to artisinalnoth.ing (which has the same problem as expertsexchange.com funnily enough), You may notice that I’m able to render a similar list without messing it up.

To fix this, the author would need to put their <li> items in an overarching <ol>. That’s it.

I’m sure this isn’t Medi Madelen Gwosdz’s fault (the person who wrote the article), and I bet Medi didn’t read this blog post many times after they posted it, and surely added to the zeitgeist of… Why OOP is bad?

Look, this guy is a better writer than me, but they were publishing on stack overflow. I expect corpo blogspam, and this site is very far from being the worst.

The main Point: Medi can’t modify this list, because whatever renderer their blog is using doesn’t know what that is. If that sounds annoying and banal then yup it pretty much is.

Here’s what was created by the rendering engine they use

<ol>
  <li>Standups are for sycophants</li>
</ol>
<p>The first criticism is that this article doesn't take a stand on anything</p>
<ol>
  <li>Prioritizing polish</li>
</ol>
<p>
  I'm not going to read this after I get paid to write for yockyard, so who
  cares that this will get rendered as "1. 1." - Not ME!
</p>

If it’s not clear above, to fix this you’d want to put the li list item tags in the same ol ordered list tag, not split them up. Also, that’s not what the original article says.

What can you do?

How can you avoid the fate of this corporate blog?

1. use a better renderer hugo seems to be pretty good with this. To be fair, this is not because Hugo is good, rather their markdown engine (which is what I’m using) is great. Shoutout to Goldmark.
2. read your own blogposts It’s not (overly) narcissistic to re-read your old articles. Heck, I am setting up a practice to double-check and review my old work. I’ve noticed some of my older blogs now recommend defunct stuff, and uplift opinions I don’t have any more. Like Gatsby - this should never be used.
3. Don’t make ordered lists I don’t know why this blog has to use a badly formatted ordered list, but whatever.

More pedantry to follow

Stay “tuned” for me nitpicking other people’s (very old) work.