302469 - npr.org - NPR Home page does not lay out well

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[charles.choi]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050718 Camino/0.9a2
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.8b4) Gecko/20050718 Camino/0.9a2

In the page http://www.npr.org, the left hand side columns are not aligning
correctly.  It looks like the columns are split in two when they should be one.
Note that both Safari and Mozilla 1.7.8 render this page correctly. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Pull up www.npr.org

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Confirmed in 2005072708 (v0.9a2+).  This worked fine on the branch, so it's a
regression.  The oldest nightly I have onhand is July 13, and the layout is
messed up in that, too.

Unfortunately, it works correctly in the equivalent Deer Park (20050727), so
somehow we have a Camino-only layout bug again.

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

It looks like we're mis-parsing? comments at some point, because there's a stray
--> where the right-hand column "breaks".  If you look at the source, that
"story" is not even supposed to be shown (it's all commented out).

Ironically, if you save the page as HTML complete (and fix the URLs to the
@import stylesheets, which don't get saved when doing HTML complete), the page
displays properly.

Bizarre.

Comment 3

[Simon Fraser [no longer active]]

Lays out the same (broken) in Camino and Deer Park builds for me.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Per comment 2, this has nothing to do with layout.  I bet the issue is that the
site document.writes out invalid comments.  We used to always parse
document.write stuff in quirks mode, but we've started using the page mode for
it, and this page is in standards mode...

Comment 5

[Blake Kaplan (:mrbkap) (inactive)]

Morphing this into an Tech Evang. bug. This is much simpler than the problem
described in bug 301847. NPR seems to use ValueClick
(http://www.valueclick.com/) for its ad code. This ad code contains the following:
document.write('<!-- SPONSOR BUCKET ---------->\n');
// ad code
document.write('<!-- END SPONSOR BUCKET ------------>\n');

The second comment (END SPONSOR BUCKET) has 14 -s. Because NPR's homepage is is
standards mode, the two extra -s in the document.write() mess up the comments,
confusing the parser, and causing us to appear to misrender the page.

The simple fix for this case would be to make the two comments be standards
compliant (and easier to count!) and use:
document.write('<!-- SPONSOR BUCKET -->\n')
// ...
document.write('<!-- END SPONSOR BUCKET -->\n');

and the problem would be fixed.

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Looks like NPR fixed this; the home page renders identically in Firefox 2, Camino trunk, and Safari 3 for me as of this evening. Marking FIXED.