Google Docs and the <string> tag

I was debugging some problems quoting a piece of a Google Doc article when I noticed something funny in their HTML source, an apparent string bogon. For example:

<pre> List&lt;String&gt;<string> ls = ... ;<br/> Collections.sort(ls, new Comparator&lt;String&gt;() {<br/> public int compare(String s1, String s2) {<br/> return s1.length() - s2.length();<br/> }<br/> });<br/></string></pre>

In context, I think this is really a tag, not a badly escaped piece of the source document. A little googling didn’t find any information about it. I’m fairly sure this was never a real HTML tag or a browser extension, though I could have missed one somewhere. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Is this unique to this one page, or does this appear in other Google Docs pages as well? Does anyone have links to any other public Google docs pages? I couldn’t find any, which is in itself a little surprising. Are only Google employees allowed to make their docs public from Google servers>

I tried editing a page or two myself, and I wasn’t able to make this tag appear. Perhaps it was just manually inserted by the authors for their own purposes?

FWIW, the page in question is not well-formed HTML or XHTML. However, aside from this tag it’s pretty standard HTML, though it does overuse the br element.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 9:03 AM and is filed under XML. You can follow any responses to this entry through the Atom feed. You can make a comment, Digg this story, or trackback from your own site.