Anthony Ettinger wrote:
It works everywhere else (FF, Opera, Safari), but IE7 seems to not
like the ? in a url, and wraps it within a table cell.
Stay tuned to seeing other browsers behave that way, too. According to
Unicode line breaking rules, a break is permitted between a question
mark ? and an alphabetic character, even when no space intervenes.
Although HTML or CSS specifications do not require Unicode conformance,
there seems to be a trend of changing browsers to apply some of the line
breaking rules. This is a long story; see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/nobr.html
In practice, this means that there will be more and more situations
where you want to use either the nonstandard HTML markup
nobr.../nobr or its CSS counterpart, white-space: nowrap, when your
text contains special characters (or, as here, punctuation marks in
contexts other those of a natural language). Despite the name, the
white-space property affects line breaking in general, not just
whitespace handling. (Even the CSS 2.1 draft says that This property
declares how whitespace inside the element is handled, painting a wrong
picture, but the description of the nowrap value says suppresses line
breaks within text.)
Markup is a cell in a table like this:
td class=pana
href=foo.com?long_url=herefoo.com?long_url=here/a/td
First of all, in practical terms, it might be best to avoid the problem.
URLs should be avoided in document content, as opposite to normal
descriptive link texts. But sometimes you wish to write _about_ URLs,
and then you need to mention them.
CSS is:
td.pan { overflow: hidden; width: 12em; }
td.pan *:first-child { display: block; overflow: hidden; width:
12em; }
Actually this doesn't quite the demonstrate the problem, since your
sample URL is shorter than 12em, in any normal font. Anyone who wants to
test your example needs to modify it to see the effect.
So I tried entity encoding the question mark as #60;
That can't help, since #60; means exactly the same as ?. It is
converted during the lexical processing of HTML markup, so the
notational difference cannot have an effect on rendering.
I also tried { white-space: nowrap; } on the td CSS rule, but that
didn't do it either...again this is only IE7.
This is where things get really interesting. In a later note you added:
Adding it to both rules worked
And in fact, it has the desired effect when placed in the second rule,
td.pan *:first-child { ... }. You probably first tried it in the first
one, then added to the second, and didn't check what happens when you
put it in the second one _only_.
It seems that you have encountered a serious bug in IE 7. By CSS
specifications, the white-space property is inherited, so the a
element should inherit it from its parent, td, since no style sheet
assigns a white-space value for the a element. This seems to be a
general bug in IE 7. If, for example, we have
spanfoo izip zap/i bar/span
and we assign white-space: nowrap to the span, then the effect should
extend to the inner element's content zip zap as well. However, IE 7
breaks between zip and zap when it sees that fit. Even if we think
that suppresses line breaks within text does not mean _all_ text in
the content of the element but just directly contained text, inheritance
rules say that inner elements inherit the value.
However, we could still characterize the IE 7 behavior as feature, not
bug, if we (rather articially) describe it so that the browser style
sheet contains the rule
* { white-space: normal; }
This is different from the fact that normal is the initial value. Such a
hypothetical browser style sheet prevents any inheritance for the
white-space property.
This bug has serious implications for any use of white-space: you need
to set it for inner elements as well. I guess it generally suffices to
replace
foo { white-space: nowrap; }
by
foo, foo * { white-space: nowrap; }
for any selector foo.
It appears that IE 7 implements td nowrap in a manner that does not
quite correspond to a white-space: nowrap declaration for the cell
element, as we might expect. It affects whitespace handling but not e.g.
line breaks after ?. The nonstandard nobr.../nobr markup is more
effective.
Thus, using the CSS white-space property is the simplest way _provided_
that you take a precaution against the lack of inheritance on IE 7.
Jukka K. Korpela (Yucca)
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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