Re: safari rendering bug: site display not correct

Eric Lindsay wrote: 
In article <tph-E7E6FA.22301429122005@localhost>,
 Tom Harrington <tph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


In article <41jp9pF1fdigqU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Markus Dehmann <markus.dehmann@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


I produced this little mini example that shows the problem:

<html><body>
<div><p>plain<b>bold</p></div>
<div><p></b>plain</p></div>
</body></html>

The second "plain" is not plain in safari, but it is in firefox and opera.


I produced a much more elaborate test page, showing the same problem (you will note that I am not actually calling it a bug) with several varieties of inline elements.


The problem there is not Safari, it's your HTML. Your tags are not nested properly, so your HTML is not valid. Most browsers try to be flexible in what they accept, but here the error is clearly your own, and you cannot reasonably expect a specific rendering.


Tom, I'm not sure how much use it is to point out (totally correctly as far as I am concerned) that the problem is invalid HTML. Yes, it would probably be better for Markus if the comment entry form checked for invalid elements and failure to close inline elements (and either rejected or fixed them). But equally, it probably isn't anything that Markus actually controls. Given the vast majority of web page creation tools don't produce valid (X)HTML, it follows that the great majority of web pages are also invalid. Interesting data point - last check I know of, in 2002, only 6% of W3C members had valid front pages! If not them, then who?

Markus asked about sending in a bug report. In Safari, second item in the Safari menu is Report Bugs to Apple. If you know someone who has an Apple Developer membership, see if they can also get it into one of the more official problem lists. Checking Dave Hyatt's blog about Safari might also be worthwhile. I can't recall if he had a comment section.

Personally I think an inline tag should be closed off when it hit another block element. But that will break many badly written web pages. Little wonder web developers like Dave Hyatt now seem to be putting more of their attention on getting standard mode working better, and ignoring problems with quirks mode rendering. I can't see anyone being able to track all the problems there.

Thanks! I entered the problem as bug 6302 in http://bugzilla.opendarwin.org/

(this bugzilla is linked from Dave Hyatt's page and collects bugs related to the "WebKit" used for rendering in safari)

Markus
.

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