280302 - Page source change alters display.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Toolkit :: View Source, defect)

Description

[Sean Pearson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

At the link mentioned above, below the line "Character-class ... described"
there is a line of white space before the linked word "above."  Selecting the
section and choosing "View Selection Source" show HTML that would properly
produce what is seen.  However, choosing "View Source" from the context menu, or
opening the page in Emacs to edit it, shows the </p></li> tags immmediately
before the period, where they should be.  It appears that Mozilla is mangling
the source code before rendering it, and that the mangled form is displayed when
"View Selection Source" is used.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Open the link
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/regex/Pattern.html#jcc
2.  Choose "View Source" from the context menu.
3.  Search for the string "Character-class"
4.  Alt-tab to the web page.
5.  Select the lines from "Constructs... to "...above."
6.  Right-click and choose "View Selection Source"
7.  Compare the two source code views with the rendered page display.

Actual Results:  
The software inserted a line of whitespace where none should be.  Basically, it
moved the </p></li> end tags to before the <a> tag instead of after the </a>
tag.  This caused a visible display difference.

Expected Results:  
The page should be rendered the way Netscape Communicator 4.8 displays it. 
Whatever changes Mozilla makes internally to the source code to help in the
display, the changes should be appearance-neutral, and in this case they are not.

Comment 1

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

For layout problems, it's worthwhile looking in a current build of either
Firefox or the App Suite before going to all the trouble of reporting them:
Firefox 1.0's layout dates back to a branch last April. In this case, the fixup
for that page's error (the <a name="jcc"> is never closed) is now considerably
nicer, keeping the link inside the <li> instead of moving it outside.

Comment 2

[Sean Pearson]

So, where do I such a build of Firefox that works?

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewforum.php?f=23