AOL8 wraps blocks of text with <font face="arial,helvetica"><font size="2" family="SANSSERIF" face="Arial" lang="0">. The gecko:editor uses <small> elements to change the font size. Due to a bug in older versions of IE, text which is contained within a combination of a <font size = 2> and <small> elements renders too small. (IE 6 does not have this bug) Proposal: Strip off the <font> element when pasting content from AOL8.0, substituting some markup that the gecko:editor understands and is also compatible with older version of IE.

I think it should be all platforms since we can see this type of data everywhere.

Do we know which versions of IE have this problem? I see the problem on my system which has IE6 - i.e., the AOL8 on my system shows the problem and uses a recent version of IE. However, IE6 standalone does not show the problem.

If I type in a local file URL to the testcase in AOL8 it displays properly. But it does not display properly when the same testcase is displayed as a AOL8 mail message. So it isn't a bug in an earlier version of IE. Probably AOL8 mail specific.

So I wrote a few test cases and I think I see the source of the inconsistency. It seems that when the font size isn't specified, the default size in Gecko and in IE6 matches the size for <font size="3"> ... whereas in AOL mail the default size matches <font size="2">.

Yes, I've confirmed that AOL7/8 assume Arial 10pt is the default font. They do this by changing the default font and size when viewing mail. IE and Gecko set the default to Times Roman 12pt on WIN32. This is the cause of this bug.

So what's the solution? How do we know that the source of a paste was AOL8? Are we going to ignore font size 2 for all pastes?

The more I think about this, the more I agree with Kin. This really needs to be fixed in aol8. They should set the default to 12 and explicitly specify 10pt in their font tags, which they are outputing anyway.

EDITORBASE+

Discussed in edt. Plussing.

I have to confess, I don't understand what problem is being reported in this bug. What does IE have to do with this? When I look at the attached testcase with either IE 5 or latest Gecko, all text is being displayed with the same size on my system.

Marking invalid based on comment#6. Applications that want to avoid the inconsistency between AOL8 and Gecko should avoid using UI that produces <BIG> and <SMALL> elements.

marking verified since we know the culprit is the forced font size