Bazaar icons do not appear beside blueprints in Google Chrome

[Scott Armitage]

When viewing a list of blueprints for a particular project in Launchpad (in this case, PyPE at https://blueprints.launchpad.net/pype), I have become accustomed to seeing a small Bazaar icon next to blueprints that have been associated with a branch (linked). These display properly in Firefox 3.0 on Linux and Firefox 3.5 on Windows.

When using Google Chrome (3.0.197.11), these icons do not appear, making it impossible to see at a glance which blueprints have been associated with a Bazaar branch.

[Scott Armitage (scott-armitage)]

The attached screenshot shows https://blueprints.launchpad.net/pype using Chrome, with no Bazaar icons next to any blueprints.

[Scott Armitage (scott-armitage)]

The attached screenshot shows https://blueprints.launchpad.net/pype using Firefox, with Bazaar icons next to blueprints that have an associated Bazaar branch.

[Scott Armitage (scott-armitage)]

I believe that I know the cause of the issue; the Bazaar icon is generated (in Firefox, anyway) by the following line:

<span alt="branch" title="Branch is available" class="sprite branch" />

Enabling resource tracking in Chrome developer tools, I see several errors popping up that read:

XML self-closing tag syntax used on <span>. The tag will not be closed.

I tried saving the source of the blueprints page to my desktop and manually modifying one of these span lines to read like the following:

<span alt="branch" title="Branch is available" class="sprite branch">&nbsp;</span>

When I load this test page, the Bazaar icon shows as expected (see attached screenshot). I'm not sure that this is the best solution, but I believe that it determines the source of the issue: self-closing tags on span are ignored by Chrome. I'm not sure what the (X)HTML spec says about self-closing spans -- is this a Launchpad bug for using them, or a Chrome bug for not closing them?

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Browsers and the HTML 5 specification are converging on parsing behavior needed for compatibility with the Web. According to the current draft of the HTML 5 specification, Chrome is doing the right thing: <span> is a phrasing element, and is therefore not in the class of elements that is allowed to close itself.

You can see this behavior at the HTML 5 validator. <http://livedom.validator.nu/?%3C!DOCTYPE%20html%3E%0A%3Chtml%3E%3Cspan%20%2F%3EThe%20rain%20in%20Spain%20is%20%3Ci%3Emainly%3C%2Fi%3E%20in%20the%20plain.%3C%2Fhtml%3E>

So, it's a bug in Launchpad.