Layout hickup right here in this forum

Can you spot it?

[drbrain]

<edit>Oops! I was mistaken, it happens only on the last paragraph. Something with the HTML converter.</edit>

This is very common, right in this very paragraph there's a layout goof that you can spot if you have a browser that does correct layout of line boxes (I can see it in both IE6 and Mozilla). Its very tricky, you'll have to look closely and think about how the style of the paragraph element and the style of the font element interact. Yes! its in this and any other multi-line paragraph!. In fact, you can only spot it on the very last line of a paragraph (like this one).

(No offense to those who designed the HTML for this site, when I first came across it, it a whole channel full of us a good while to figure out where it came from.)

[edited by: drbrain at 6:46 pm (utc) on May 8, 2003]

[pageoneresults]

Yup, there is no <p></p> for the first paragraph of the message. At times, the </p> closing paragraph tag is missing.

[drbrain]

Nope! But its related.

Now I've edited my post and destroyed the effect, the plain text to html converter is being tricky. However your post above displays it, if you make the window narow enough so that the text can wrap.

[pageoneresults]

<FONT face=verdana color=#000000 size=2>Yup, there is no &lt;p&gt;&lt;/p&gt; for the first paragraph of the message. At times, the &lt;/p&gt; closing paragraph tag is missing.<!-- /post --></FONT> <BR>

The above is what I see when viewing the source for my reply. What is it that you are seeing? Something different? Are you referring to the <BR> element?

[drbrain]

A missing paragraph close tag doesn't cause it. Its much more insidious than that.

Hint:

</font><p><font ...
doesn't cause it to happen

It can't happen with:
</font>
<p><font ...

In this forum, it will happen with:
<font size=2>...</font> <br>
...

Give up?

[mavherick]

<font size=2>...</font>_<br>

Does the space between the </font> and <br> is acutally there? I would assume that then that extra space would revert to the default font size and create a gap on that line if the default font size is larger then size 2.

[drbrain]

Bingo! mavherick is the winner! Any amount of whitespace (tab, space or newline) causes it.

If you look very closely at the last line of some paragraphs, you'll see a slightly larger gap between the top of its text and the bottom of the text above it than exists between any other two lines.

In Mozilla, if you highlight the text, the gap is obvious, and the last character on the line (the whitespace) matches up with the line above it.

[pageoneresults]

This also occurs if you have hanging </p> and </td> tags and has been the subject of many questions like; why is there a space between the 2nd and last line of my paragraphs.