223776 - oldsfbooks.com - Bad HTML causes links to display in IE but not Mozilla

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect, P4)

Description

[Mike Christie]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.5b) Gecko/20030827

The links in the main table either fail to display as links or display with
extraneous characters included.  Examination of the HTML reveals that it is
badly-formed.  However, IE displays this as the author intended.

It's apparently a generated page: the HTML includes this meta tag:

<meta content="MSHTML 5.00.2919.6307" name=GENERATOR>

Googling this string plus "generated by" seems to indicate a connection with
something called "hypermail".

The HTML is sufficiently badly formed that I can't quite see how IE is capable
of determining what is supposed to be done, but somehow it does.  I posted to
n.p.m.g to try to get some insight into what it was doing, but the only item I
got that I haven't mentioned above is that this page renders correctly in
Netscape 4.8, so whatever the workaround is, it's in NS too.

If this were authored HTML I'd be more inclined to write to the author and
suggest they fix it, but since it's generated there's no chance of that happening.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to http://oldsfbooks.com in both IE and Mozilla
2. View the links in the contents table.
3.

Actual Results:  
Links do not display in Mozilla but do display in IE

Expected Results:  
I would like Mozilla to be as tolerant of poorly formed HMTL as IE is.

Comment 1

[Mike Christie]

Attachment: The source of the html page http://oldsfbooks.com as of 26 Oct 2003

The html referenced in this RFE

Comment 2

[Mike Christie]

My mistake: changing this to an enhancement.

Comment 3

[Bill Mason]

This should either be a WONTFIX or become a Tech Evang bug.  There's no reason
in the world we should support tag soup like this.

    <TH><FONT color=black><A href="pulp.html"
       </A><left>Pulp Magazines
              <li>  <A href="pulpa.html" </A><left> A        </left>
              <li>  <A href="pulpbh.html" </A><left> B -> H  </left>
              <li>  <A href="pulpir.html" </A><left> I -> R  </left>
              <li>  <A href="pulpsz.html" </A><left> S -> Z  </left>
                   </FONT></B></TH>

Comment 4

[Jungshik Shin]

over to tech-evangelism

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

looks fixed, ugly but fixed