Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:04:58 UTC

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Bug 2387 - Missing/invisible text in Macintosh Internet Explorer
Missing/invisible text in Macintosh Internet Explorer
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Parser (Other open bugs)
unspecified
Macintosh Mac OS X 10.3
: Lowest normal with 1 vote (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2005-06-11 10:09 UTC by Kevin
Modified: 2011-03-13 18:04 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Kevin 2005-06-11 10:09:17 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
Comment 1 Brion Vibber 2005-06-11 10:20:45 UTC
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.
Comment 2 Kevin 2005-06-14 09:52:55 UTC
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

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