289804 - energy.ca.gov - Text is garbled by overlapping lines

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Jim Ronback]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050317 Firefox/1.0.2

Text is garbled by overlapping lines in Firefox 1.0.2, making some lines
unreadble. This is due to missing blank lines between groups of lines. THE SAME
url displays ok with Windows IE 6.0.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.go to http://www.energy.ca.gov/pier/papers_presentations/index.html with Foxfire
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
Text is garbled by overlapping lines in Firefox 1.0.2, making some lines unreadble.

Expected Results:  
There should be some blank lines betwen the groups of lines to avoid overlapping
of text as seen when using MS IE 6.0.2800.1106

Comment 1

[José Jeria]

This is because the divs in the middle section have a class called pdf with
height:16px;

--> Tech Evangelism

Comment 2

[Jim Ronback]

I disagree that this is a tech evangelism problem. Why is it that the text is
not garbled with IE 6.0? How come thay are adding blank lines between the groups
of lines and Firefox does not do that? What are they doing that is smarter than
Foxfire?

Comment 3

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

"Problem" exists with Camino as well (unsurprisingly so, since this appears to
be a Gecko behaviour). Also present with Safari (KHTML), leading me to believe
this is a bug in IE's rendering engine.

For the record, that page doesn't validate (41 errors), and I'm pretty sure the
HTML 4 spec says the Gecko/KHTML behaviour is the correct one (rather than the
IE behaviour).

Agree with the tech evangelism classification; this is the site owner's problem,
not MoFo's.

Comment 4

[Jim Ronback]

I'm puzzled by the logic that says if it looks good on IE 6.0 it must be a bug
in IE 6.0 rendering engine! The 41 other errors is a red herring. What is the
error in IE 6.0 rendering engine???

Comment 5

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

Because IE treats width (and height) as min-width (and min-height). They set an
actual width and we respect that, but IE doesn't. Since they tested with IE they
think it is fine, but they really are relying on an IE bug. 

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Without turning this into too much of a discussion about Web design and the
pitfalls of single-browser testing, I'd like to address Jim's question:

"I'm puzzled by the logic that says if it looks good on IE 6.0 it must be a bug
in IE 6.0 rendering engine!"

You're leaving out a key element of the process.

If it looks good on IE, *and looks terrible on standards-compliant browsers such
as those based on Gecko and KHTML*, the problem is with IE.

A site can look good with IE and other browsers, but if it looks great on IE and
awful on everything else, the designer is using (probably without knowing it)
some of IE's numerous rendering bugs as a crutch. The problem with IE is there
are so many of these bugs, it's almost impossible NOT to do this unless you test
on multiple browsers, which the designers of that site clearly haven't done.

Please direct your concerns to that site's webmaster, and feel free to point
him/her to this URL. I'd be happy to address this problem privately; just click
on my name to e-mail me.

cl

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

The folks at ca.gov have been very cooperative in fixing this problem. This bug
can be closed.