Question

Back in 2009 I wrote a page (http://www.ikriv.com/dev/dotnet/JavaClone/index.html) that contains a lot of fragments like this:

<sup><a href="#ref14">[14]</a></sup>

I think it looked fine back then in both Firefox and IE. To my astonishment, I found today that Firefox 14.0.1 shows some of them as expected, while some others are shown as if there were no sup tag.

The even funnier part is that IE8 has trouble at exactly the same places Firefox does, only instead of ignoring superscript it inserts an extra line break.

Chrome does the same thing as Firefox: some superscripts are fine while others are ignored.

I could not find any regularity in that, but three things are certain:

some fragments are displayed as expected and some are not

all major browsers seem to have problem at exactly the same places

if I remove the <a> tag, everything is back to normal

What gives? Is putting <a> inside of <sup> illegal or something?

Answer 1

The problem isn’t with sup embedded in a, it’s the a tags with no inner text:

<a name="Interfaces" />

Inspecting this with Firebug shows that Chrome doesn’t like this. It ignores the self-close and interprets everything after as being inside that a tag.

Change that like to:

<a name="Interfaces"></a>

and the problem with the superscript links corrects itself.