[patch] Zero width space poorly supported in IE6

[hyuga <hyugaricdeau@…>]

The defect here is of course more with IE than with Trac, but it might be something worth doing something about. By default, IE does not correctly display, or not display as the case may be the zero width space (U+200B) used by the new AJAXy repository browser, causing a box to be displayed next to every folder icon.

This can be worked around by installing East-Asian language support in Windows, and fussing with default fonts, but unfortunately I don't have control over how users' fonts are configured.

A possible solution would be to use a normal nbsp for IE6, which still looks okay, and use a zwsp for the rest of the civilized world.

[hyuga <hyugaricdeau@…>]

A suggested fix to this problem using *sigh* browser detection

[evantdster@…]

Non-breaking spaces and zero-width spaces are basically opposite things. One displays white-space, the other doesn't. One allows the line to break, the other doesn't. There may be a suitable replacement character, but it seems unlikely to be nbsp. I have trouble imagining that this would block release though. On the other hand, I have no real affiliation to the project.

[hyuga <hyugaricdeau@…>]

Replying to evantdster@gmail.com:

Non-breaking spaces and zero-width spaces are basically opposite things. One displays white-space, the other doesn't. One allows the line to break, the other doesn't. There may be a suitable replacement character, but it seems unlikely to be nbsp. I have trouble imagining that this would block release though. On the other hand, I have no real affiliation to the project.

True, but whether it breaks or not doesn't seem to particularly matter here. The only goal here is to get IE to behave, which this fix seems to achieve. I haven't managed to get any other space character to be displayed properly by IE without a fair amount of tweaking that users can't be expected to have to do if they don't want all those little squares in their repository browser (and believe me, I wish it weren't the case, but they will complain about it).

[Christian Boos]

Alternative fix, using &nbsp; for all browsers.

[Christian Boos]

I also think that in this case, using a &nbsp; could be made to work.

Can you confirm that this works for IE6 (can't test that anymore myself)?

Seems to work fine with IE7, Opera and FF, but I'd like to get some more feedback before committing the fix.

[hyuga <hyugaricdeau@…>]

I tested it in Opera 9, IE6, and FF2 with no problem. The padding/margin adjustments seem to make up for the extra space well enough.

[Christian Boos]

Patch applied in [6375], thanks for the feedback!