Working With Rails

I have the same problem. I’m on Firefox on WinXP. Resolution 1600×1200.

It works fine in IE6 and IE7, just not in Firefox.

The problem is with long strings that contain no spaces. Typically this is the case with URLs. It seems firefox doesn’t like to break those strings so it just renders them in one long line, even if doing so breaks out of the DIV that is supposed to contain them.

I’ll be releasing a whole load of code enhancements soon which include making the DIV in which the body of the message appears much wider and doing away with the sidebar on the right when reading forum posts. It doesn’t actually fix the above problem but it means it happens less and when it does it doesn’t look nearly so bad.

What I really need to do is parse a post when it is made and insert some spaces that Firefox can use to break on. But then anyone copy and pasting the URL rather than clicking on it will have problems.

Any other ideas for solutions?

Well it might not be a great idea but you could set a max-width value and turn overflow:auto on with CSS. This would create a horizontal scroll bar on the fields that exceed the width and don’t wrap. max-width only works with Firefox and is disregarded by IE6 and lower but IE seems to be working fine already.

You can also use this in your ruby code:

def split_str(str, len = 100) 
  fragment = /.{#{len}}/ 
  str.split(/(\s+)/).map! { |word| 
    (/\s/ === word) ? word : word.gsub(fragment, '\0 
 ' ) 
  }.join 
end

With all respect to Del, I feel pretty strongly about using CSS and valid XHTML only for layout and style. I don’t feel that it would necessarily be a good idea to resort to Ruby code for this type of challenge. The problem is in the markup and/or CSS and should be addressed at that level IMHO.

I agree with Paul, overflow:automatic or maybe overflow:hidden would be the easiest options. as this is happening with link, nobody needs to see the whole link anyway, and they would still have access to it. the page will break right after the link, so no words will be missed with overflow:hidden. remember jsut not to put an absolute value for height.

Just released a fix. Let me know if it doesn’t work!