413485 - ohio.gov/wagehour.bes.state.oh.us - "&nbsp" appearing in links

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Steve VanSlyck]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11

This is a page generated by the Wage & Hour Division of the Ohio Department of Commerce. It is essentially a table of contents to the Division's prevailing wage rate database. Each link starts with an &nbsp (no semi-colon), possibly because the page was written for IE. The error does not appear in IE.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log in to the PW Database by going to http://198.234.41.198/w3/webwh.nsf/wrlogin/?openform
2. Create an account for testing purposes.
3. When you get to the page at http://198.234.41.198/w3/webwh.nsf/wrview select "Franklin County" from the middle dropdown and press the "View Wage Rates Button." Do not use the other two dropdowns.

Actual Results:  
4. See the attached file

Expected Results:  
5. The code is wrong - someone should contact the webmaster and ask them to write their page with compliant code.

This is a tech evangelism issue - it is not a Firefox bug.

Comment 1

[Steve VanSlyck]

Attachment: PDF example of page showing effect of bad HTML

Comment 2

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

To satisfy my own curiosity: in what world is "&nbsp" valid markup of any kind? Does IE actually interpret this as a non-breaking space of some sort? If so, isn't that a bug in IE?

Steve, can you please post a sample of the page source here, too? It doesn't have to be the whole page source (although you're welcome to attach that if you want), but just a few lines of the table will suffice.

Comment 3

[Steve VanSlyck]

Attachment: Page Source Code

No, "&nbsp" isn't good code and I am shocked - shocked I tell you! - that IE would parse it. I'm just posting so that someone in Firefox Officialdom can get the webmaster's attention and get the state to fix it by writing standards-compliant code - namely /correct/ code. I've tried several times but I'm a nobody and haven't had any success.

Comment 4

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> To satisfy my own curiosity: in what world is "&nbsp" valid markup of any kind?

Microsoft's.

The actual SGML rule, that an entity begins with & and ends with the next character which cannot be part of an entity's name, is insane for HTML. Maybe SGML authors all knew what were and weren't namechars, but HTML authors certainly don't. Microsoft's solution was to say the hell with the standard and with forward compatibility, and so they render &not/that as ¬/that and &notthat as ¬that, while we render them as ¬/that and &notthat. Their way is much easier to understand and explain, it just happens to be wrong.

(Then there's the fact that they knowingly released tools which *produced* that sort of invalid and certain to be misinterpreted markup, but I presume they thought "hey, there's a war on.")

Comment 5

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Steve, what sort of response (if any) have you gotten from them in your attempts to contact them? Do you have contact addresses we could use? I assume you've tried the standard evangelism letter:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tech-evangelism/site/procedures.html#contacting

(If not, please try that.)

Confirming because there's clearly a bug here.

Comment 6

[Steve VanSlyck]

I have not tried the standard evangelism letter because no email contact has been successful at all.

What I did was telephone the Wage & Hour Division at the Department of Commerce and get myself transfered "to the person responsible for coding the prevailing wage website," although I surely didn't use those exact words. I did get through to a tech assistant and raised the issue and she advised she would bring it up with her supervisor. This was several months ago.

Comment 7

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

Might be time for another phone call, this time asking for names and e-mail addresses, as well as direct phone numbers. :)

Comment 8

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

INCOMPLETE due to lack of activity since the end of 2009.

If someone is willing to investigate the issues raised in this bug to determine whether they still exist, *and* work with the site in question to fix any existing issues, please feel free to re-open and assign to yourself.

Sorry for the bugspam; filter on "NO MORE PRE-2010 TE BUGS" to remove.