283350 - Link underline broken for links with varying font size within link text

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Jonathan Birge]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.999
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0 StumbleUpon/1.999

Hopefully you'll be able to see the WSJ page I mention. In the first story, the
link has a large capital first letter, in a different font size than the rest of
the link text. The underline below this link is not contiguous with the rest of
the link. It's obvious why this is, but it's not obvious that it's the correct
behavior, as it looks terrible. I'd be happy to take a crack at fixing it if
somebody could point me to the right section of code. I took a cursory look at
the code base, but couldn't even find the place where link underlining is handled.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Just go to any site which has links with changing font size within the link
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
The link underline size and location goes by letter, and is therefore broken up.

Expected Results:  
Picked an underline location and size that would work consistently over the
entire word.

Comment 1

[Ben Fowler]

Do you have a shorter testcase?

Comment 2

[Jonathan Birge]

Attachment: Short HTML showing link underline problem

Here is an excerpt from a WSJ page showing the discontinuous underlining for a
link with varying font size withing the link text.

Comment 3

[Jonathan Birge]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Do you have a shorter testcase?

Sorry about that. I've attached a simple testcase. Again, if anybody can point
me in the right direction in the code base, I'd be happy to take a crack at
this. It makes for some fairly ugly pages when it happens, though it's very
exceedingly rare that people change font size within a link.

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

Dup of bug 50410?

Comment 5

[Jonathan Birge]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Dup of bug 50410?

Definitely not. In fact, as far as I can tell, 50410 is resolved (even though
it's not marked as such). At the very least, it's not a duplicate since I don't
see the problem in the 50410 testcase, but I obviously do with the present bug.

Comment 6

[Ben Fowler]

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050221
Firefox/1.0+

Both your testcase, and the one on Bug 50410 "[quirks]Text that's bold and
underlined is handled wrong" (id=13548) WFM.

Perhaps there is something in my set-up that hides the bug. (The letter u
falls below the rule, but I don't think that that signifies anything).

Comment 7

[Jonathan Birge]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Both your testcase, and the one on Bug 50410 "[quirks]Text that's bold and
> underlined is handled wrong" (id=13548) WFM.

Hmm. My testcase fails on both Linux and Windows for me, using the
out-of-the-box settings. Regardless, the fact that my testcase fails for me but
the 50410 bug works for me at least indicates that it's not a duplicate. As far
as I can tell, the 50410 bug refers to underlined bold text, and mine refers to
the underline of a link that is 

Comment 8

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Unfortunately, sites actually expect this behavior in quirks mode...  In
standards mode, we do the right thing, as expected, but the testcase is in
quirks mode.

Comment 9

[Jonathan Birge]

(In reply to comment #8)
> Unfortunately, sites actually expect this behavior in quirks mode...  In
> standards mode, we do the right thing, as expected, but the testcase is in
> quirks mode.

I'm confused. I thought quirks mode was supposed to emulate existing behavior 
of IE as expected by existing webpages (WSJ.com, for example). Well, IE 
displays the underline in my testcase with a uniform underline. Mozilla 
displays it with a broken underline of differing thickness. So calling this 
trivial is probably warranted, but calling it invalid really isn't, unless the 
concept of quirks mode is meaningless.

Comment 10

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Mozilla's behavior in quirks mode is to draw the underline using the current
font style.

IE's behavior sounds more complicated.  It'll draw the underline with different
colors in different parts, for sure (and this part is absolutely depended on by
pages).  Sounds like it doesn't change anything based on the font-size.... if
someone can produce a clear description of exactly what IE does, we can try to
implement it.