287907 - Whitespace interpreted as <br>

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 2750

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[alutian]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050321 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050321 Firefox/1.0.2

Whitespace in HTML should be ignored. Firefox interprets linefeeds in the source
code as HTML (space). 

This was a bug introduced with IE6? The problem was introduced with images in
tables. <img blahblahblah></td> is interpreted differently to <img
blahblahblah>(linefeed)</td> 

Firefox is incorrect. ALL whitespace within a HTML file should be ignored, with
the sole exception that whitespace WITHIN TEXT should be collapsed to a single
space character. Whitespace between HTML tags should be ignored totally. The
formatting between tags is solely for ease of reading of the source file. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
The following HTML is simple... 

<b>
W
</b>
ord
<br>
<b>W</b>ord



Actual Results:  
'W' (in bold) (space) 'ord'
'W' (in bold) 'ord'

Expected Results:  
Both lines should be the same - the 'W' in 'Word' should be in bold, and not
followed by a space character, whatever the formatting of the HTML. 

I flag this as 'Trivial', as the results are cosmetic. But, this is a
fundamental problem. Firefox should render the HTML code, and ignore the
formatting between the tags.

Comment 1

[Alexey Chernyak]

DUPE.
But triaging this at 3am is a headache, so I'll leave it to someone else to
decide what to do with this.

The bug is valid for HTML:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#notes-line-breaks

This bug is hazily valid for XHTML 1.0, which places a burden of defining white
space handling onto CSS2:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#uaconf

Further XHTML languages don't even want to deal with this leaving it all to CSS:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xhtml-modularization-20010410/introduction.html#s_intro_formatting

However CSS2 does a pretty poor job at this:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#white-space-prop

But this is fixed in the upcoming CSS 2.1 standard:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/text.html#q8

And made even more complex in CSS3:
http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#white-space-processing

The original ancient bug for this is bug 2750. Though it deals with HTML Parser,
while nowdays it's more about CSS with XHTML coming into play.

Some other bugs that already touched on this:
UNCONFIRMED
bug 36717 - testcase
bug 245926 - testcase
NEW
bug 132561 - testcase and patch
bug 157698 - testcase
bug 197716 - testcase
bug 209073 - and bugs mentioned in it

There are probably much more of them. Can someone deal with this mess?

Comment 2

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 2750 ***

Comment 3

[Alexey Chernyak]

VERIFIED