Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:04:58 UTC
I have seen this error on all wiki sites I have visited, not just Wikipedia. I've never seen it on a non-wiki site. It happens using Explorer 5.2.3 on OS 10.3.9 (I know most people have switched to Safari, but Explorer has some features I need). It has been happening since at least 10.3.6. It works fine on Windows Explorer, Safari and Firefox. I'm not sure if it shows up when running OS 9.2.2 and Explorer 5.1, but it might. The bug is that some text on pages is invisible. It doesn't happen every time, on every page or even in the same place, but it happens most of the time on most pages, especially complex ones. One example is the Germanic Language article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_language With my computer, the first paragraph is missing the word "change" as in "...most famously the consonant change known as Grimm's law." This may not come up as missing on your computer. Sometimes text becomes visible after a reload or once visible text disappears. To verify, you'll probably have to check many pages. Try to find complex ones with lots of text, tables and links. When you find some good pages, look for lines that end prematurely in the middle of paragraphs. The missing text is usually 3 to 9 words long and happens repeatedly throughout an article of sufficient length. The missing text can be seen if the entire article is copied into a word processing application. I think that it's usually caused when an internal wiki link, which uses [[link text]], is directly followed or preceeded by punctuation or perhaps any non-blank character. It may have other causes, like the use of double apostrophes. The text usually turns invisible at or near the link and then becomes visible when a new line starts. Thanks
Mac IE is exceedingly buggy, and line breaking / text wrapping behavior does indeed sometimes 'disappear' bits of text (among many other problems). I don't think there's a darn thing we can do about it, though. I'd ask you to report the bug to Microsoft, but I believe they've stopped development of this product and haven't put out a bugfix release in the last two years despite its large number of widely-known bugs.
Okay. Thanks, Brion. Once I found what seems to be the trigger, I suspected it was Explorer's fault. If Safari and Mac Firefox didn't have their own severe problems, I would have abandoned it by now. Right now I'm using all three because they have compatibility, speed and function problems. Oh well. Thanks again, Kevin
