233280 - AddFreeStats.com polls broken in standards mode

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Cody 'codeman38' Boisclair]

User-Agent:       
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040131 Firebird/0.7+

The code used by AddFreeStats.com to offer free polls for web pages is
standards-incompliant, and causes pages to render very incorrectly in standards
mode.

For an example of a page rendered in standards mode that uses this particular
poll script, see, for instance:
http://presurfer.meepzorp.com/archive/2004_02_01_archive.html
Note that all the entries after "Janet Jackson Apologizes" are missing (view
source to see what's going on).

Note that the bug doesn't appear on AddFreeStats' page itself, despite the fact
that it too uses broken comment syntax, because it renders in quirks mode.
The reason?  Simple:  Unpaired double-hyphens in the comment that opens the poll
script.  As anyone who follows Mozilla evangelism bugs knows, this is not proper
comment syntax; see, for instance,
<http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.4>.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit any site rendered in standards mode that uses the polling script (for
instance, the Presurfer link in the details below).

Actual Results:  
The poll doesn't show up, and everything up to the next HTML comment is not
displayed.

Expected Results:  
The poll appears and doesn't break any of the following content.

Comment 1

[Cody 'codeman38' Boisclair]

(And by "details below", of course, I meant "details above". I can never
remember what order Bugzilla posts these fields in anymore...)

Comment 2

[Cody 'codeman38' Boisclair]

Presurfer has since removed the poll from their blog; anyone able to find
another example of a page rendered in standards-compliance mode that uses this
particular code snippet?

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

I'm going to mark this WORKSFORME since the original site disappeared and we don't have any current examples to show whether or not there's a problem any more.

If someone runs across one, a *new* TE bug should be filed and the source of the broken page should be uploaded to that bug as an attachment.