111609 - newline (LF) in alt text displayed as square

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 67127

(Core :: Layout, defect)

Description

[mmo]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.6) Gecko/20011120
BuildID:    2001112009

A newline character is displayed as a square character instead of a space
when in ALT attribute.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load given URL.

Actual Results:  The following element is displayed with a "square" character
between the first and the second line:
<img width=400 height=100 src=none alt="first line
second line">

Expected Results:  A space is expected.

Comment 1

[R.K.Aa.]

Regression. This was once bug 2756, fixed nearly 2 years ago..

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

What are other newlines in the file?  Are the all LF, or are the rest CRLF?

Comment 3

[André Dahlqvist]

The same thing happens with the "title" attribute. But the standard says:

The attribute value may only contain letters (a-z and A-Z), digits (0-9),
hyphens (ASCII decimal 45), periods (ASCII decimal 46), underscores (ASCII
decimal 95), and colons (ASCII decimal 58).

Is this also true for the alt tag?

Comment 4

[André Dahlqvist]

Attachment: Testcase to make it easy to test how this looks.

Comment 5

[André Dahlqvist]

Ahh, in bug 2756 this part of the standard is quoted:

CDATA is a sequence of characters from the document character set and
may include character entities. User agents should interpret attribute
values as follows:
 o Replace character entities with characters,
 o Ignore line feeds,
 o Replace each carriage return or tab with a single space.
User agents may ignore leading and trailing white space in CDATA attribute
values (e.g., "   myval   " may be interpreted as "myval").

from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#h-6.2

Comment 6

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

Ok, that's how the testcase looks:
Opera 6 complete ignores the line feed
NS4 does not display a tooltip at all
MSIE displays the line feed as a line feed

My personal opinion is that it should be converted to a space.

Comment 7

[Christian :Biesinger (don't email me, ping me on IRC)]

Andre:
According to http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/global.html#adef-title, title is
not CDATA, but Text, which matches what you first pasted here (which is from
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#attributes, linked from the last
URL you pasted)

Comment 8

[mmo]

The citation in comment #3 is not complete and AFAIK not relevant for this bug.
Here is the complete paragraph from
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html#attributes".

"In certain cases, authors may specify the value of an attribute without any
quotation marks. The attribute value may only contain letters (a-z and A-Z),
digits (0-9), hyphens (ASCII decimal 45), periods (ASCII decimal 46),
underscores (ASCII decimal 95), and colons (ASCII decimal 58). We recommend
using quotation marks even when it is possible to eliminate them."

Comment 9

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

The linefeed should be converted into a space in the *parser*, see bug 47078.
See also related bug 67127.  One should be able to insert newlines in attributes
by using 

 or something like that (I can't remember which is CR & LF).

Comment 10

[Tim Hunt]

I believe that the quote in comment number 8 is not describing what can appear
as Text, but when it is permissible to omit the quotes.

Text in the HTML spec is a synonym for CDATA, at least at the level of the DTD,
so what should happen is covered here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-cdata

Notice that with image alt text, this bug only occurs in quirks mode, and only
when the image has width and height attributes specified. See the test case that
I am about to attach

Comment 11

[Tim Hunt]

Attachment: Testcase

Comment 12

[Jaagup Irve]

Note that the same applies to <abbr title="blabla
blabla" >blbl</abbr> at:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-css3-box-20010726/

rest your mouse upon dotted W3C link and wait for the tooltip to appear.

Comment 13

[Oliver Hardt]

Allthough there wasn't anyone caring about this bug for about half a year : Is
anyone working on fixing this ?

IE is handling this perfectly and web apps like phproject use this feature
heavily to output event data (as alt from img tags).

Bye,

  
Oliver

Comment 14

[R.K.Aa.]

dup

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 67127 ***