[pmwiki-users] IE 5 Mac Newline Problem

[Joachim Durchholz]

Benjamin Fay wrote:

> I don't have IE 5.5 for Mac either, so i can't test it. Several people told me 
> that the layout is broken on Mac IE 5.5, meaning there are linebreaks but i 
> don't know where it happens.

Hmm... that's complicating things considerably.

Can you somehow persuade those people to send you a screenshot? People 
are notoriously unreliable when describing broken layouts in words, 
since they tend to mix their own theories of the cause with the 
description. Often enough, it turns out that their theories were wrong 
and the desciptions misleading. Screenshots don't interpret :-)

> Either here:
> <div id='wikitext'>
> <p>text						<----
> </p><p class='vspace'></p>

As far as I can tell, that's fairly standard HTML that even IE on Mac 
should be capable of rendering. (Then again, with MS software, or 
software in general, you never know...)

> Or here:
> <p> <br />text <br /><span style='font-size:83%'>  <----

Font sizes shouldn't be set to percentages. ("Percent of *what*? Of the 
font size we're about to set right now???" The CSS semantics isn't 
well-defined here, and browser implementations differ. IE is known to 
misapply this; I suspect it ends up applying the percentage twice.).

"font-size:-1" would be better, that means "one size step below what the 
user settled for as standard size". It's not perfect either, but font 
size is a hairy problem anyway: HTML doesn't give you the proper knobs 
to turn.

You could also prepare test pages for these people. Say, let the page 
display, capture the HTML source, remove the suspect markup, store the 
result under some fixed URL as a simple HTML file, then let those who 
complain try these pages and report back which of them still show the 
"broken" layout. That should narrow down the problem space.

> As far as i remember i traced this problem once and found that its the newline 
> before a html tag. Very strange i know. It might also be the <br /> that IE 
> 5.5 does not understand. Can someone test this?
> Example page: http://kuttimc.com/wiki/km.php?n=Main.Presse 

It looks just fine on my browser, but that's Mozilla so I didn't expect 
any problems :-)

Regards,
Jo