280669 - Text sometimes bleeds outside table cells.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: Layout: Tables, defect)

Description

[Simon Waters]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

This probably only affects quirks mode, on bad HTML, but...

Sometimes when viewing pages generated by our templating system, the text will
bleed outside a table cell, over images, or contents of other table cells.

I have yet to reproduce this with valid HTML, or even a template that produces
valid markup (hopefully all of them soon), however it is an annoying quirk, and
probably at least worth documenting, to save others who have the pain of
maintaining too many table based layouts.

The aspect that leads me to think there is a potential bug of interest, is that
when the problem occurs it can usually be resolved by clicking "Reload". i.e.
The broken table may render differently after a reload, i.e. not 100%
reproducible. I think this may be some sort of race condition in the rendering
code, as it seems to behave differently if you click reload in the middle of
loading a page, as opposed to waiting till it has finished to render, and
clicking reload.

I could not reproduce this problem loading a webpage from a file (which makes
producing a small case interesting), but only loading from a webserver (IIS, or
Squid infront of IIS respectively).

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Visit sample site given
2. If text bleeds, click reload
3. If not reproduced goto 1

Actual Results:  
Usually text bleeds from the main central area, over the right hand column.

Expected Results:  
On reload, and some other browsers, do not bleed text over table cell boundaries.

Probably due to handling of incorrectly nested table cells.

Mostly I couldn't find a report of this in the database, and I can't believe our
sites are older templates are so uniquely broken as to make it a problem on our
servers only. The bug report can remain with me if no one wants to own it (I'll
understand - broken tables are broken tables).

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Simon, could you possibly test a recent nightly build (recent nightly of Firefox
1.0+ or Mozilla 1.8a6) to see whether the bug also appears there?

Comment 2

[Bernd]

no response from reporter marking as wfm, please reopen if this is still a
problem with a current trunk build