Some time ago we stared seeing Distill insert placeholder text where empty table cells changed to have data in them. This is the ‘Visual’ setting for the ‘Explore diff’ tool. Any suggestions for avoiding it?
Thanks for any help. Appreciate this app.
@b1ackcat the page is the most likely source of the placeholder text. distill doesn’t add any content on its own to the monitored content.
one quick solution can be to exclude the element containing the placeholder text.
btw, any idea why the page could be having that content? could it be because the page hasn’t loaded completely?
The page is one created by us so we know it is not part of the code. Here is the ‘Source’ view of the same information in the ‘Explore diff’ tool. It’s an extremely simple HTML table with an empty cell. The insert text only appears when there has been a change from an empty cell to that cell having content and only on the left side of the comparison tool. It’s curious!
When an item is restocked and ‘sold out’ text disappears, there is not a matching behavior going the other direction/in the right column. Instead what appears to be a highlighted single space. I found an example with both types of change near one another. Anyway, it’s not a big issue for us, just wondered if you had insights.
the only source of the monitored content in the content in the page. the “dummy text” monitored in the page has been rendered by the page.
did you build this table or someone else did? it is possible that js running in the page updates the content after the page is loaded.
We built the page/table. The page is the table in a very literal sense. It doesn’t even have a head tag or an HTML tag, definitely no Javascript. The only code on the monitored page is a single, static HTML table and a couple of divs. It’s either being added by Chrome or added by the Distill tool. I did some searches to see if I could find any instances of Chrome adding that text to the rendering of other websites and didn’t come up with anything, so I’m guessing the Distill comparison tool is adding it. It’s not an issue. We are just looking for info. We are also considering experimenting with having an nbsp or other placeholder in empty cells to perhaps sidestep the placeholder insertion.