Can an <a> contain a <footer> in HTML5? - firefox

I have a structure which is as follows:
<a href="#">
<footer>
<p>Some text</p>
<h2>A Heading</h2>
</footer>
</a>
This works and displays as expected in all browsers (even IE6 with the HTML5shiv.js) except Firefox 3.6. In Firefox 3.6 the display is completely screwed and if you use Firebug to inspect the DOM, the <footer> element is empty and the elements which should be inside it are outside of it.
All the tags are closed correctly. The <a> is set to display:block in the CSS.
The W3C validator validates the document and does not mark this structure as incorrect.
The spec states that an <a> element may be classed as flow content when it contains other flow content. The <footer> is flow content.
Is it just that Firefox 3.6 doesn't render HTML entirely correctly?
Any ideas for a fix?
Ta!

According the W3C HTML5 Reference the Footer Elements content model is:
Flow content, but with no heading
content descendants, no sectioning
content descendants, and no footer
element descendants.
Which an a element is interactive content.(Which also can be a Flow Content)
So using the a element will validate, if you validate it against HTML5 Standards. Using something like the W3C validator.
So to answer your question, FireFox 3.6 Doesn't conform to HTML5 standards completely. FireFox 4.0 conforms better than 3.6. You can find a list of what elements of HTML5 (and CSS3) are supported by legacy browsers here.
As for the fix I would suggest that you hide the footer from Firefox, and show a div with your content in that is hidden for everything but firefox. I would accomplish this using jQuery CSS Browser Detection using jQuery instead of Hacks is a good place to start.

Firefox 3.6 doesn't implement the HTML5 parsing algorithm; it has an HTML4 "parser", basically.
I think your workaround options are:
Avoid "block level" HTML tags inside the footer.
Put a <span> as a child of <a> wrapping the <footer>.
Put a <div> as a child of <a> wrapping the <footer>.

Related

Make entire div clickable

I am trying to get the whole div clickable and this works but only with a straight link to another site. Is there a way to make it work with this text in it also:
<div class='reddit' title='Share Us On Reddit' onclick="window.open('http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=httpsFwww.example.com&title=XXX is Cape Breton's Homepage. Start Your Web Search With Beautiful Cape Breton Island')">
Thanks
From CSS Tricks
This probably isn't a thing you need to rely on JavaScript for
anymore. Since HTML5, this is perfectly valid:
<a href="http://example.com">
<div>
anything
</div>
</a>
And remember you can make links display: block; so sometimes you
don't even need the div.
<div style="cursor:pointer" onclick="document.location='evenidontknow-page.html'">
<h2>Full Div Clickable</h2>
</div
The above code helped me very well, and this will not require any extra code.
Using a tag may solve the problem but we need to add extra code to it.
please check this link for more info w3schools
Bootstrap has a feature called "Stretched Link". From the documentation:
Make any HTML element or Bootstrap component clickable by “stretching” a nested link via CSS.
You can read more by visiting the following link:
https://getbootstrap.com/docs/4.4/utilities/stretched-link/

Can I prevent Firefox from stripping custom html attributes on Paste?

If you copy some html on a page that has a custom html attribute e.g.
<p foo='bar'>this is a paragraph with custom attribute</p>
then paste it into a contenteditable element, Firefox will remove the foo attribute. It will retain any html-compliant attributes like id, name etc but none that do not conform.
Is there any way to prevent this and allow it to be pasted? IE and Chrome both allow this.
You can use data elements, see here:
http://html5doctor.com/html5-custom-data-attributes/
<li data-spacing="10cm" data-sowing-time="March to June">Carrots</li>

HTML5 - Enclosing <li> in <a> Firefox problem?

When I do this...
<li>
<a href="#">
<img src="#" width="#" height="#" alt="#" />
<ol class="#">
<li>#</li>
<li>#</li>
<li>#</li>
</ol>
</a>
</li>
It renders it in Firefox like this...
<li>
<a href="#">
<img src="#" width="#" height="#" alt="#" />
</a>
<ol class="#">
<li>a href="#">#</a></li>
<li>a href="#">#</a></li>
<li>a href="#">#</a></li>
</ol>
</li>
Seems to render properly in Webkit. Any ideas?
Although HTML5 now permits <a> elements to contain block-level elements (e.g. ol), Firefox's parser traditionally didn't accept that, instead converting them into a sequence of separate <a> inside the block level elements such that they only surrounded inline level elements, which is what you see.
Because Firefox was the only one of the major browser makes that did that, the Mozilla people accepted the HTML5 change, agreed to alter their parser to permit the <a> element to wrap block content. (It's just one of many parser changes for HTML5, although it seems to be possibly the most prominant one)
That change has happened in Firefox 4, so you won't see the problem there, but Firefox 3.x still uses the old behaviour.
Workarounds, include using a <div> with an onclick attribute instead of the <a>, and using JavaScript to wrap the block in an <a> element, but there's no non-JS solution. Given that (a) the page should still be usable as is, and (b) that Firefox 3.x should die out in the not too distant future, one reasonable option is just to accept the quirky Firefox 3 behaviour for now.
The <a> tag has a default style of display:inline; which makes it unsuitable for containing block level elements.
However, you can get around the problem by changing the display property of the <a> element to either block or inline-block, depending on how you want it to display.
(I note that you're using HTML5, so you'll be fine. Be aware that in xhtml, it is simply not allowed to enclose block-level elements inside an <a> tag. This won't affect you in this case, but it's worth knowing in case you ever have to work with code with an xhtml doctype)

Displaying links to Weather sites and other widgets

What is the best tag to use to display widgets such as links to weather sites and Google maps? My old website used <span> with src= very satisfactorily, but src= isn't available for <span> in XHTML1.1. I've tried <img> and <iframe>. <img> only displays a red cross. <iframe> displays the widget OK but there is a difference between IE and Chrome, which both display it as I want, and Firefox, which puts a visible border round the widget, which I don't want. By the way, I would prefer a non Jquery/Ajax solution.
Using frameborder=0 fixes the problem.

IE8 & FF XHTML error or badly formed span?

I recently have found a strange occurrence in IE8 & FF.
The designers where using js to dynamically create some span tags for layout (they were placing rounded corner graphics on some tabs). Now the xhtml, in js, looked like this: <span class=”leftcorner” /><span class=”rightcorner” /> and worked perfectly!
As we all know dynamically rendering elements in js can be quite processor intensive so I moved the elements from js into the page source, exactly as above.
... and it didn’t work... not only didn’t it work, it crashes IE8.The fix was simple, put the close span in ie: <span class=”leftcorner”></span>
I am a bit confused by this.
Firstly as far as I am aware <span class=”leftcorner” /> is perfectly valid XHTML!
Secondly it works dynamically, but not in XHTML?!?!?
Can anyone shed any light on this or is it simply another odd occurrence of browsers?
The major browsers only support a small subset of self-closing tags. (See this answer for a complete list.)
Depending on how you were creating the elements in JS, the JavaScript engine probably created a valid element to place in the DOM.
I had similar problem with a tags in IE.
The problem was my links looked like that (it was an icon set with the css, so I didn't need the text in it:
<a href="link" class="icon edit" />
Unfortunately in IE these links were not displayed at all. They have to be in
format (leaving empty text didn't work as well so I put there). So what I did is I add an few extra JS lines to fix it as I didn't want to change all my HTML just for this browser (ps. I'm using jQuery for my JS).
if ($.browser.msie) {
$('a.icon').html('&nbsp');
}
IE in particular does not support XHTML. That is, it will never apply proper XML parsing rules to a document - it will treat it as HTML even with proper DOCTYPE and all. XHTML is not always valid SGML, however. In some cases (such as <br/>) IE can figure it out because it's prepared to parse tagsoup, and not just valid SGML. However, in other cases, the same "tagsoup" behavior means that it won't treat /> as self-closing tag terminator.
In general, my advice is to just use HTML 4.01 Strict. That way you know exactly what to expect. And there's little point in feeding XHTML to browsers when they're treating it as HTML anyway...
See I think that one of the answers to Is writing self closing tags for elements not traditionally empty bad practice? will answer your question.
XHTML is only XHTML if it is served as application/xhtml+xml — otherwise, at least as far as browsers are concerned, it is HTML and treated as tag soup.
As a result, <span /> means "A span start tag" and not "A complete span element". (Technically it should mean "A span start tag and a greater than sign", but that is another story).
The XHTML spec tells you what you need to do to get your XHTML to parse as HTML.
One of the rules is "For non-empty elements, end tags are required". The list of elements includes a quick reference to which are empty and which are not.

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