654164 - Nesting limit and the AAA interact badly on a site created in old FrontPage with excessive <b> nesting (www.postcard.org)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: DOM: HTML Parser, defect)

Description

[JD]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.0; rv:2.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0.1

Firefox 4.0.1 is not compatible with a website created with FrontPage 2002, but the site works fine in IE 9 and previous versions of Firefox. Firefox 4.0.1 only displays part of the web page, and/or scrambles the displayed data.

Scrambled pages:
http://www.postcard.org/2011-04news.htm
http://www.postcard.org/qandaforum.htm
http://www.postcard.org/calendar.htm
http://www.postcard.org/directions.htm

Partial pages:
http://www.postcard.org/
http://www.postcard.org/links.htm


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Happens every time.

Actual Results:  
Pages are scrambled or only partially displayed

Expected Results:  
Perfect display of the web page.

Comment 1

[Alice0775 White]

                                            Result of the W3C Markup Validation Service

http://www.postcard.org/2011-04news.htm      82 Errors, 2 warning(s) 
http://www.postcard.org/qandaforum.htm      151 Errors, 2 warning(s) 
http://www.postcard.org/calendar.htm        123 Errors, 2 warning(s) 
http://www.postcard.org/directions.htm      151 Errors, 20 warning(s) 

http://www.postcard.org/                    164 Errors, 7 warning(s) 
http://www.postcard.org/links.htm           692 Errors, 2 warning(s)

Comment 2

[Alice0775 White]

Disabled HTML5 helps(html5.parser.enable to false).

Comment 3

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

It works with disabled html5 parser, moving it the html parser component but this is probably invalid.

http://www.postcard.org/ is broken with SM trunk, FF4.0 (html5 parser enabled)
works with disabled html5 parser in FF4.0, Opera11 and Chrome11 on linux 
-> http://api.browsershots.org/png/original/1f/1f9f66f257ff030e415c6553a6ad86a1.png

There is a piece of UA sniffing : navigator.appName == "Netscape"

Comment 4

[j.j.]

Attachment: testcase (reduced http://www.postcard.org/)

Not related to UA sniffing.
That's really ugly tag soup: hundreds of nested <b>s around unclosed <div> inside <table>

Comment 5

[j.j.]

BTW, testcase works in Chrome 10 and Opera 11.10

Comment 6

[Henri Sivonen (:hsivonen)]

This is the Adoption Agency Algorithm interacting with bug 354161. Unclear why bug 605466 isn't helping. Probable WONTFIX.

FWIW, Chrome 10 doesn't have the problem, because it doesn't have the nesting limit (bug 354161).

Comment 7

[j.j.]

> Probable WONTFIX.
Anyway, that's also a Tech Evangelism issue.

JD, if this your website:
  Just deleting the duplicated <b>s in source code would fix the problem,
  one <b> is enough.
If not:
  Please contact the webmaster and refer this bug report.

Comment 8

[JD]

The time and work that has gone into this bug report is much appreciated.  We have always liked Firefox.  The postcard.org web site is fully functional with the latest editions of Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.  

The postcard.org web site was created using Microsoft FrontPage 2002 in May 2003.  This is the type of code FrontPage 2002 created.  It would not be our choice for an HTML editor now, but it currently is what it is.  FrontPage codes the <b>s in the source code.  It would be unworkable on a large scale for us to recode what FrontPage 2002 produced, although it might be a possible fix for a few pages.  We simply don’t have the time and resources to recode the entire postcard.org web site that has been constantly enlarged since May 2003.  It’s a volunteer non-profit site.

We definitely would like to see Firefox 4 be a better browser than Chrome and Safari, but this bug is an obvious problem for us.

Jack Daley
Webmaster, postcard.org

Comment 9

[j.j.]

Just to be clear: Don't expect a fix in near future.

Comment 10

[JD]

At the postcard.org site we followed the advice of j.j. at bugzilla, and went through the web site page by page to correct any instances of incomplete <b> nesting.  As j.j. predicted, this resolved the issue in Firefox.  Thanks for your help.