CF 9 Ajax breaks site CSS and formatting ...

Thesis

JavaScript/CSS includes for cfwindow, cflayout-border (and possibly others), kill some formatting elements, such as <strong> & <em> tags, and negatively affects table display such as padding / margins. This is a problem.

The details

Consider the following simple cfm page:

    <p>Not Bold</p>
    <p><em><strong>Bold and italics</strong></em></p>

Not unexpectedly, the above displays one line of plain text, and one line of formatted text. The above works in both CF8 and CF9, and looks something like this:

    Not Bold
    Bold and italics

Now we try importing the javascript & css for cfwindow. Consider the following small but important change:

    <cfajaximport tags="cfwindow" />
    <p>Not Bold</p><br>
    <p><em><strong>Bold and italics</strong></em></p>

In the above, the formatting for the page breaks. All you get is plain text on both lines, something like this:

    Not Bold
    Bold and italics

The "strongs" and "ems" are completely ignored. Some testing has shown that this also happens when you import "cflayout-border". Worse, it also seems to goof-up table formatting and padding. Oh, and the same problem occurs when using the <cfwindow> tag directly, instead of just importing the cfwindow ajax and creating thru JavaScript.

Although I don really use strong or em tags anymore, this will break a lot of legacy pages. Also, since the CKEditor included with ColdFusion uses <strong> and <em> tags instead of inline styles, any pages that use content generated by CKEditor will stop showing formatted text. This is a problem if you have implemented a homebrew CMS (as we have on a few pages).

I will post a fix/workaround if I find one.

Notes

I am hesitant to post about this; last time I publicized what I thought was a bug in ColdFusion it turned out that I was just an idiot, and was doing something wrong (duh). So, on the one hand I hope that I am just an idiot (again), and that there is a simple workaround for this. Unfortunately I fear that I may have found a legitimate bug this time, and it complicates our plans (already in progress) to move to CF 9.

If this is a legitimate bug, I am surprised that something like this could have made it into final release code. It is easy to reproduce, and is immediately apparent in both FireFox and IE. I have read thru the CF 9 release notes, and performed an hour of two of testing, and haven found any obvious workarounds. If you have an idea, please let me know. Otherwise, I think that we are going to have to look at waiting to upgrade to CF 9 for a little while. Bummer.

 Original Source:
http://nm1m.blogspot.com/2009/10/cf-9-ajax-breaks-site-css-and.html