490854 - Line breaks after </dt> tag.

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout, defect)

Description

[ghzpc]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.8) Gecko/2009032609 Firefox/3.0.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

EXAMPLE:

Unlike MSIE, Firefox causes a line break after the </dt> tag, preventing the use of a colon as in:

<dl>
<dt>LASER</dt>:
<dd>
Acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
</dd>
</dl>

Having the colon inside the tag may result in search engines incorrectly seeing the colon as part of the spelling and improperly index it or fail to index it at all. Colons are common punctuation marks for introducing lists and as such should be seen immediately after the title and on the same line. Firefox, however, forces an arbitrary line break after the </dt> causing the colon to appear on the line below the title like this:

LASER
:

Acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE:

Should an editor prefer to keep the definition of the title inline with the title, like many dictionaries do, the arbitrary line break will mess up the layout.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
<dl>
<dt>LASER</dt>:
<dd>
Acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
</dd>
</dl>
Actual Results:  
LASER
:

Acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Expected Results:  
LASER:

Acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

This appears to be an easy fix ... however please note, that although I submitted this as a trivial incident, proper layout is not trivial. It is the main purpose of the browser ( assuming it also works and is secure ).

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan]

IE 8 standards mode results in the same rendering as Firefox. Additionally the html5 validator produces the same output. http://bit.ly/uQCs7