Internet Explorer won't hide nested paragraphs

[danep]

Hi all,

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed. It appears
that the inner <pdoes not inherit the "display: none;" property or
somesuch. Is there a way to force IE to hide the nested paragraphs
without specifically specifying "display: none;" in every single one?

[VK]

On Mar 11, 7:12 pm, "danep" <danepow...@gma il.comwrote:

Hi all,

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed. It appears
that the inner <pdoes not inherit the "display: none;" property or
somesuch. Is there a way to force IE to hide the nested paragraphs
without specifically specifying "display: none;" in every single one?

You cannot nest paragraphs: each P element ends up by meeting closing
</ptag or by meeting opening tag of any other block element
including another P - whatever comes first. This behavior by design
and by standards. If you really need to nest block elements, don't use
P, use other elements - say DIV.

[danep]

On Mar 11, 11:26 am, "VK" <schools_r...@y ahoo.comwrote:

On Mar 11, 7:12 pm, "danep" <danepow...@gma il.comwrote:

Hi all,

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed. It appears
that the inner <pdoes not inherit the "display: none;" property or
somesuch. Is there a way to force IE to hide the nested paragraphs
without specifically specifying "display: none;" in every single one?

You cannot nest paragraphs: each P element ends up by meeting closing
</ptag or by meeting opening tag of any other block element
including another P - whatever comes first. This behavior by design
and by standards. If you really need to nest block elements, don't use
P, use other elements - say DIV.

Thanks, I changed the outer one to a DIV and it does the trick, though
it required rewriting a lot of CSS. Strange, if what you say is true,
that for once IE conforms to standards and FF doesn't.

[Rob Waaijenberg]

danep schreef:

Hi all,

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed. It appears
that the inner <pdoes not inherit the "display: none;" property or
somesuch. Is there a way to force IE to hide the nested paragraphs
without specifically specifying "display: none;" in every single one?

When I try this at home,
using Firefox,
the word test is still displayed

--
Rob Waaijenberg

[VK]

On Mar 11, 7:36 pm, "danep" <danepow...@gma il.comwrote:

You cannot nest paragraphs: each P element ends up by meeting closing
</ptag or by meeting opening tag of any other block element
including another P - whatever comes first. This behavior by design
and by standards. If you really need to nest block elements, don't use
P, use other elements - say DIV.

Thanks, I changed the outer one to a DIV and it does the trick, though
it required rewriting a lot of CSS. Strange, if what you say is true,
that for once IE conforms to standards and FF doesn't.

Hard to believe but it happens as well :-)
I guess it is because Gecko browsers have to accommodate XHTML rules
as well atop of HTML with possible "Appendix C trickery" thus fell-
formed XHTML served as text/html. Just a speculation from my side.

[Jim Moe]

danep wrote:

>>

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).

Thanks, I changed the outer one to a DIV and it does the trick, though
it required rewriting a lot of CSS. Strange, if what you say is true,
that for once IE conforms to standards and FF doesn't.

Because you did not provide an URL, there is no definitive way to say
why FF displays as you expected. A likely reason is that you are missing a
DTD (doctype), using an invalid one, or XHTML.
Also your example was invalid implying other invalid markup.

--
jmm (hyphen) list (at) sohnen-moe (dot) com
(Remove .AXSPAMGN for email)

[David Dorward]

On Mar 11, 4:12 pm, "danep" <danepow...@gma il.comwrote:

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

Invalid.

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).

So it error corrects and happens to do what you want.

However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed.

So it error corrects and does something other than what you wanted.

[Eric Lindsay]

In article <11************ **********@8g20 00cwh.googlegro ups.com>,
"danep" <da********@gma il.comwrote:

On Mar 11, 11:26 am, "VK" <schools_r...@y ahoo.comwrote:

On Mar 11, 7:12 pm, "danep" <danepow...@gma il.comwrote:

Hi all,

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed. It appears
that the inner <pdoes not inherit the "display: none;" property or
somesuch. Is there a way to force IE to hide the nested paragraphs
without specifically specifying "display: none;" in every single one?

You cannot nest paragraphs: each P element ends up by meeting closing
</ptag or by meeting opening tag of any other block element
including another P - whatever comes first. This behavior by design
and by standards. If you really need to nest block elements, don't use
P, use other elements - say DIV.

Thanks, I changed the outer one to a DIV and it does the trick, though
it required rewriting a lot of CSS. Strange, if what you say is true,
that for once IE conforms to standards and FF doesn't.

Not really strange. If your HTML is invalid (and a P within a P is
always invalid) then any browser has to handle the problem as an error
condition. There is no standard for handling errors, which is part of
the reason so many people here say you must supply validated HTML.

--
http://www.ericlindsay.com

[Lars Eighner]

In our last episode,
<11************ **********@p10g 2000cwp.googleg roups.com>, the lovely and
talented danep broadcast on comp.infosystem s.www.authoring.html:

Hi all,

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

><p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed. It appears
that the inner <pdoes not inherit the "display: none;" property or
somesuch. Is there a way to force IE to hide the nested paragraphs
without specifically specifying "display: none;" in every single one?

A paragraph containing a paragraph is not valid, and in fact, in HTML 4.01,
it is impossible since the second <pis presumed to close the first
P element. Your markup (not "code" because HTML is a markup language, not
a programing language --- the ML stands for markup) is invalid because it
has an extra </p>. Whatever a browser does with invalid markup is okay;
after all you broke your document by using invalid markup. IE did the
right thing and assumed the extra </pwas an error. Firefox did the right
thing because it happened to guess what you might have meant to.

You do not always get consistency when you have a valid document. But you
cannot expect consistency at all when you do not have a valid document.

Bottom line: P is a block element that cannot contain any block element.
You cannot nest P. Why in the world would you think that you could?

--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/ <http://myspace.com/larseighner>
Countdown: 680 days to go.

[Andy Dingley]

On 11 Mar, 16:12, "danep" <danepow...@gma il.comwrote:

On my site I have a section of code that resembles the following:

<p id="gear" style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>
</p>

This renders fine in Firefox (that is, nothing is displayed).
However, in Internet Explorer, "test" is still printed.

I was surprised to see your claim here that FF displays nothing and so
renders this incorrectly. I then tried it out myself (with an
appropriat page header added) and AFAICS, FF is correct and does show
"text".

Of course I should have simply ignored your posting as:
* It discusses complicated rendering behaviour
* It's a posted example, not a live URL
* It's a partial fragment.

Any of these is reason that we need to see exactly what you're seeing,
otherwise we just can't expect to see the same behaviour. Which
doctype did you use? Which doctype declaration? Which content-type?
As to why it does all this, then it's quite simple. However it's an
SGML parsing issue, not an invalid code issue. Although error
correction mechanisms in each browser are (legitimately) potentially
different, they all ought to parse valid SGML correctly even if this
doesn't mean quite what the author intended.

<pcan't nest a <pinside it, so the start of the 2nd <pimplictly
closes the first one. It's not "nested" and so the display property
obviously isn't (and shouldn't be) inherited.
It's still valid though (there are plenty of valid pages without a
single </pend tag anywhere near them).

Compare these instead:

<p style="display: none;">
<p>test</p>.

<div style="display: none;">
<p>test (div)</p>
</div>

See the difference? Try looking with the FF DOM Inspector

These are still valid HTML and are sufficient to give the behaviour
that has puzzled you. They're not _invalid_ until we encounter the
second </p>, which is an end tag to an element that has already been
closed.

Browsers may well vary in how they handle this spurious end tag
(another reason to use valid code). However explaining your specific
issue doesn't require invalidity.