297521 - Site created with frontpage has mismatched <td> and </td> tags and renders poorly, text overprints, etc.

Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Steve]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050225 Firefox/1.0.1

Admittedly this site sucks, but it exhibits a problem I have noticed on a few
other sites, this problem occurred with Mozilla, and the problem continues with
Firefox.  

The problem is this: 
The page renders poorly.  Text overprints other text. I have taken a look at the
source and I surmise the problem is that the page has about 9 <td> tags and I
stopped counting at 160 </td> tags.  How this could have occurred I have no
idea, bad technique on the part of the page designer and Microsoft. Pox on them
but that matters not one bit.  

IE however renders the page correctly. IE apparently ignores and tries to fix
such errors in HTML markup, and Firefox does not. 

It's hard to argue that in the face of such goofy behavior on the part of the
Microsoft Frontpage tool and the user that the problem is with Firefox and not
with Frontpage or the user, but if the goal is the acceptance of Firefox as a
good replacement for the IE browser *USERS* will not accept any argument about
"bad web design" or "errors in the HTML" being the problem.  They will just use
a browser that doesn't have (or show) the problem. I would therefore argue that
such issues should be fixed regardles of how well Firefox follows and IE
deviates from any standards proposed by any august body. 

FWIW, I noticed a related looking problem in the past on slashdot.org, but they
seem to have finally fixed it.  When viewing an individual story on that site
the comments started pretty far down the page. I did not compare to IE and like
I said it seems to have been fixed recently but it looked like a related problem. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.View page with Firefoz, page renders poorly. 
2.View page with IE, page renders correctly


Actual Results:  
Page renders incorrectly. 

Expected Results:  
Tried to fix web design errors like it's competitor does. Sad but true.

Comment 1

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
reproduction information if you have it.

If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Thunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/releases/1.5beta1.html
Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 2

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This bug has been automatically resolved after a period of inactivity (see above
comment). If anyone thinks this is incorrect, they should feel free to reopen it.