The One And Only Shrine of...

Mozilla Bug #16696!


     Hello, and welcome to the only website on the internet dedicated to Mozilla Bug #16696! That's probably a good thing. :) Mozilla Bug #16696 was submitted by me (Mr. Gus), and this page exists to explain it further than in the bug report, and to provide a better and more clear example (not to mention a couple screen shots, just in case my system hails from hell, and exists only to confuse Mozilla coders :).


Bug Description-
     One of the first things you should notice about this webpage is the background. It consists of (yes, I'm aware that I'm explaining the obvious) of a bar on the left, and space on the right for the text. This is a popular enough design, with the "bar" on the left usually being used for navigation buttons. In the case of this page, it's only used as aesthetics, since it's an important aspect of the bug.

     Now, the second thing you should notice (especially if you run in a larger resolution) is that the "bar" repeats itself. This is not usually intentional. The problem is that the creator of the image did not put enough space to the right of the bar. When a webmaster passes by this problem, the background is usually wide enough for 800x600 resolutions or 1024x768. For the purpose of explanation, I went to an extreme with this repeating-background error.

     To keep this readable, I've used tables, but usually when a webmaster makes the above mistake, they do not have enough forsight to use such restrictions (if they did, they wouldn't make the mistake). When tables aren't used, the text continues over the bar to the right. If the color of the text contrasts well enough with the bar, it isn't much more than a slight annoyance. However, when the text doesn't contrast, that can make it unreadable. This page, for example, has black text with a black bar. Black on black is not readable. I'll demonstrate by letting a passage from Stephen King's "The Dark Tower III" flow into the bar:

       "Don't ask me silly questions, I won't play silly games," Jake muttered, looking at the final picture. It showed Charlie the Choo-Choo pulling two bunting-decked passenger cars filled with happy children from the roller coaster to the Ferris wheel. Engineer Bob sat in the cab, pulling the whistle-cord and looking as happy as a pig in shit. Jake suppoed Engineer Bob's smile was supposed to convey supreme happiness, but to him it looked like the grin of a lunatic. Charlie and Engineer Bob both looked like lunatics ... and the more Jake looked at the kids, the more he thought that their expressions looked like grimaces of terror. Let us off this train, those faces seemed to say. Please, just let us off this train alive.
 


     None of what I've talked about up until now was the bug itself, but here is where the bug comes in. The way you to read the text above (presuming you aren't running in 320x200 or some other insanely-low resolution) is to select it, normally. Under Netscape (v4.61), selected text eliminates the background, showing only the text in reverse-color and a box around the text in a color that contrasts well. Under Mozilla (M10 build and nightly build 1999102008 tested), however, the selected text does not eliminate the background, simply reversing the background. If the text is unreadable on the background, because it simply reverses the portion of the screen with the selected text, the text will remain unreadable when selected. Since I can't explain this without being wordy and slightly confusing, I'll demonstrate:

  The text under any browser
  The "solution" under Netscape v4.61
  The non-working solution under Mozilla Build 1999102008


When text is selected, it should not display the background. Mozilla should work like the second picture, however, the third demonstrates how Mozilla currently functions. The fact that it does is what makes up Mozilla Bug #16696.

Some information-
     Since this is really just a glorified response to an e-mail, some information about my system should be availabe for author of the e-mail.
  • Mozilla (Win32) versions used: Milestone 10 and Nightly Build 1999102008
  • Netscape version used: Netscape Communicator v4.61
  • Both running under: Windows 98
One last note-
     On October 22nd, 1999, all the images were made compliant with the Netscape 216-color pallete to prevent massive dithering in 256-color video modes. One typo was fixed, too. I have absolutely no idea why anybody would want to, but you can access the old version of the page (complete with rogue pictures and a typo) here.

This silly site created by:   Mr. Gus on October 22th, 1999.