PMOC HTML oddity

[+Corey]

I have one PMOC, and the page is formatted oddly in Safari. After "This is a subscriber-only cache", everything else on the page is small and/or bold.

 

In the source, I see:

 

<!-- End Cache Title Area -->

<span id="MemberText" style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:X-Small;font-weight:bold;">This is a subscriber-only cache.<br><FONT SIZE=1><STRONG><A HREF="./auditlog.aspx?ID=877444">Read the audit log</A></STRONG> (see who viewed your cache)<p></FONT><br></span>

 

I think this extra <p> tag near the end is messing things up. What's it doing there?

[+paleolith]

GC1C7VJ looks fine to me in both Opera and Safari under Windows.

 

An extra <p> tag should never cause problems beyond possibly an extra blank line, and usually not even that.

 

Have you changed anything since posting? What version and OS of Safari are you using?

 

It has been noted here recently that sometimes gc.com software isn't uniformly deployed across all servers, so it's possible you could see an error which not everyone sees.

 

Edward

[+Corey]

GC1C7VJ looks fine to me in both Opera and Safari under Windows.

 

An extra <p> tag should never cause problems beyond possibly an extra blank line, and usually not even that.

 

Have you changed anything since posting? What version and OS of Safari are you using?

 

It has been noted here recently that sometimes gc.com software isn't uniformly deployed across all servers, so it's possible you could see an error which not everyone sees.

 

Edward

Everyone else's members-only caches come out fine for me...

I'm seeing this on both Tiger & Leopard (Safari 3.1?). Camino and other browsers don't seem to have the problem. I suppose Safari's dealing with the invalid (badly nested) HTML differently.

[+Miragee]

The page looks fine to me using Opera.

[+paleolith]

Everyone else's members-only caches come out fine for me...

Good clue, now I see it. It happens for my own PMOCs but not for anyone else's. (I don't have any PMOCs, so I created one unpublished to check it.) I see it in Windows Safari 3.1.1. Try logging out and see if Safari displays it correctly then.

I'm seeing this on both Tiger & Leopard (Safari 3.1?). Camino and other browsers don't seem to have the problem.

IIRC, there are two primary HTML rendering engines on the Mac. I can't remember which browsers use which one.

I suppose Safari's dealing with the invalid (badly nested) HTML differently.

Trouble is, it's unclear whether there is a nesting problem due to other errors being served up by Groundspeak. In HTML 4.01 Transitional, <p> tags are not required to be closed, but in XHTML they must be closed. The worst of the document errors is a <link> preceding the <!doctype> which should be the absolute first thing. This makes the doctype invisible if the web page is parsed per the standards. It's actually pretty amazing that browsers are successfully displaying the gc.com XHTML pages without a proper doctype. Or given that the pages aren't valid XHTML, maybe it's this error which is enabling them to be displayed at all.

 

Note that the W3 HTML validator shows 74 errors on the page. These are Groundspeak errors, not yours. The misplaced doctype causes many of the errors: it specifies xhtml, but the validator assumes HTML 4.01 Transitional in the lack of a proper doctype. I don't recall what (if anything) browsers are supposed to do in the absence of a proper doctype. But if Safari is trying to interpret the page as HTML 4.01 Transitional in quirks mode, and the others are treating it as XHTML in quirks mode (or vice versa), that could explain the difference.

 

This is actually a pretty bad gc.com error and I'm surprised that it isn't causing more problems.

 

Edward

Edited May 25, 2008 by paleolith

[+Corey]

Good clue, now I see it. It happens for my own PMOCs but not for anyone else's. (I don't have any PMOCs, so I created one unpublished to check it.) I see it in Windows Safari 3.1.1. Try logging out and see if Safari displays it correctly then.

Well, of course you can't see a members-only cache when you're logged out...

I'm seeing this on both Tiger & Leopard (Safari 3.1?). Camino and other browsers don't seem to have the problem. IIRC, there are two primary HTML rendering engines on the Mac. I can't remember which browsers use which one.

Yes, I think Safari uses WebKit, Camino and Firefox use Gecko.

Edited May 26, 2008 by qwerty56

[+paleolith]

Well, of course you can't see a members-only cache when you're logged out...

Oops, sorry, yes you would have to sign in on a different account to verify that it's OK from any other account. Unless you trust those who've responded here. Trust but verify.

 

Edward