156123 - Hover style affects all text after an anchor.

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect)

Description

[Steven Don]

When an anchor is placed on a page that is not closed with </a>, the a: styles
are applied to all text after it. I'm not entirely sure, but when using anchors
to mark places in a document to jump to, I thought they didn't have to be
closed. Check out the testcase in the URL I have provided. This happens on quite
a lot of pages out there and makes reading them quite difficult.

Try:
http://www.wintellect.com/resources/newsletters/jan2001.asp

I don't recall older Mozilla builds (pre 1.1, I'm currently using 2002061104)
doing this.

Comment 1

[Bill Mason]

<a> anchors have to be closed like any other <a> tag.  If it's not closed, it's
not unexpected that the browser might treat all the text that follows as
contained in the opening <a> while it looks for a closing tag.  I know I've seen
some older builds follow the same behavior (for example, your testcase behaves
the same way in Netscape 7 PR1).

Reference: <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#edef-A>
"Start tag: required, End tag: required"

Resolving bug as invalid.
(The page on wintellect.com is not an example of this problem because the
paragraphs are coded in the style sheet to change color when hovered over.)

Comment 2

[Steven Don]

(The page on wintellect.com is not an example of this problem because the
paragraphs are coded in the style sheet to change color when hovered over.)

Hmm... the stylesheet would indeed indicate that. Strangely enough, MSIE doesn't
change the colour of all the text, though, just of the links. IIRC, Mozilla used
to do it the same way, which was less distracting. Perhaps it's not a bug, but
it doesn't seem right.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

> Mozilla used to do it the same way

That was a bug.  Consider:

p:hover { color: red }

<p> <a> text </a> </p>

Hovering the text should make it red; in the old Mozilla impl (and the current
IE impl) it does not.