400307 - Inconsistent parsing of <a><div>...</div></a>

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 324875

(Core :: DOM: HTML Parser, defect)

Description

[Doug Shea]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.9a9pre) Gecko/2007101804 Minefield/3.0a9pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.9a9pre) Gecko/2007101804 Minefield/3.0a9pre

All the titles of the strip on this page should be a large bold yellow-ish color; however, the title for strip #297 is a small bold red color. The source for this title is exactly the same as others on the page, generated by the same script and using the same CSS. The title of this strip looks correct in other browsers, such as Safari and Opera, but incorrect in Firefox and Camino.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load http://ver3.sundayat10.com/archive.php?num=289
2. Scroll down to the June 18, 2007 comic.

Actual Results:  
The title of that one comic is small, bold, and red.

Expected Results:  
The title of that comic should be like all the rest, large, bold, and yellow-ish.

Comment 1

[Jesse Ruderman]

I can reproduce the bug as described.  Looking at the page with DOM Inspector, I see
   A
     DIV
for the titles that look "good" and
   A
   DIV
     A
for the title that looks "bad".  

Firefox's handling of this invalid HTML is inconsistent.  I think this is the "if the TCP/IP packet boundary happens to fall in the wrong place" case that http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1138169545&count=1 alludes to.   I'll attach a testcase that demonstrates something similar using document.write but I'm not sure it tests the right code.

This is definitely a bug in Firefox's HTML parser, but the workaround for the webmaster is easy: make the markup be <div><a>...</a></div> instead of the invalid <a><div>...</div></a>, and style the <a> element with "display:block" if you want the space to the right of the text to be clickable.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Attachment: testcase using document.write

Comment 3

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

This is either a dupe of bug 324875 or depends on bug 328930.