274242 - paraglyphpress.com - Web page renders very poorly (apparently not standards compliant)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Rod Smith]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040920 Firefox/0.9.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0

The Paraglyph Press Web page (http://www.paraglyphpress.com/) has serious
formatting problems -- text in table cells overlap other cells. This is visible
in the table on the right ("The Inside Track"/"Recently Published Paraglyph
Titles"/etc.) and, further down the page, some overlapping text and graphics.
The page does display sensibly in Konqueror and in Opera. I've tested with
Firefox 1.0 on Fedora Core 3, Firefox 0.9.3 in Gentoo Linux, and Firefox 1.0
Preview in Windows Me, with the same results in all three Firefox versions.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to the specified Web page
Actual Results:  
The page layout was bad, as described.

Expected Results:  
The page layout should be legible, as in Konqueror or Opera.

Comment 1

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

this is very tag-soup-ish, I'm not sure we can do anything "expected" with this,
its pretty bad as HTML goes.

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.paraglyphpress.com%2F

there's quirks, and then there's downright guessing.

Comment 2

[Rod Smith]

(In reply to comment #1)
> this is very tag-soup-ish, I'm not sure we can do anything "expected" with this,
> its pretty bad as HTML goes.

I've contacted the site's webmaster, and he's cleaned up the page. It now comes
up as valid on the W3C site, but it still has problems in Firefox -- even more
so than before, if anything. I've traced the problem to the "bodytext" style in
a CSS loaded by the page:

	.bodytext {
		font-size: 12px;
		color: black;
		font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, Serif;
		text-decoration : none;
		font-weight : normal;
		height : 17px;
	}

In particular, Firefox is interpreting the "height" line as referring to an
entire block of elements. I suspect the page creator intended it to refer to the
line height within that block, but the elements to which this style was applied
spanned multiple lines. I don't know enough about CSS to know how this tag is
supposed to be used, so I'll leave it to you to decide how to proceed.
Meanwhile, I'm sending this information to the site's webmaster.

Comment 3

[zmanji]

(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > this is very tag-soup-ish, I'm not sure we can do anything "expected" with this,
> > its pretty bad as HTML goes.
> 
> I've contacted the site's webmaster, and he's cleaned up the page. It now comes
> up as valid on the W3C site, but it still has problems in Firefox -- even more
> so than before, if anything. I've traced the problem to the "bodytext" style in
> a CSS loaded by the page:
> 
> 	.bodytext {
> 		font-size: 12px;
> 		color: black;
> 		font-family: verdana, arial, helvetica, Serif;
> 		text-decoration : none;
> 		font-weight : normal;
> 		height : 17px;
> 	}
> 
> In particular, Firefox is interpreting the "height" line as referring to an
> entire block of elements. I suspect the page creator intended it to refer to the
> line height within that block, but the elements to which this style was applied
> spanned multiple lines. I don't know enough about CSS to know how this tag is
> supposed to be used, so I'll leave it to you to decide how to proceed.
> Meanwhile, I'm sending this information to the site's webmaster.

I don't think there is anything wrong with the .bodytext style. I loaded the
site up in dreamweaver and had a look at it. I don't find anything wrong with
the .bodytext style. Could be something else, or did I miss something?

Comment 4

[Rod Smith]

The site's webmaster has changed the style so that it no longer causes problems.
(I believe he just removed the height tag from the CSS.) If the height tag
should not be causing problems in this context, you might want to experiment
with it, perhaps starting with the Paraglyph Press page as a template.

Comment 5

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Page is now all in Japanese, but renders identically in Safari 3, Camino trunk, and Firefox 2. FIXED, as far as I'm concerned.