A singular verbatim tag in a form field messes up a TWiki form as seen in Item864. Subsequent form fields are shown verbatim as HTML table tags. See screenshot.

The value of the "Details" form field as saved on disk is as follows: "---+++!! Details%0d%0aMuch improved ...snip... These log sections are surounded by <verbatim> tags so ...snip... Because they are in a &lt;verbatim&gt; section, the &lt;ol&gt; and &lt;li&gt; tags are displayed in the page in the normal view.%0d%0a%0d%0a---+++!! Test Case%0d%0aTest Case%0d%0aThe original:%0d%0a%0d%0a<verbatim>%0d%0a   0:000 : 8a 84 f4 ...snip...%0d%0a</verbatim>%0d%0a%0d%0aOpen the page ...snip... displayed as:%0d%0a%0d%0a<verbatim>%0d%0a<ol>%0d%0a<li> :000 : 8a 84 f4 01 ...snip...%0d%0a</li>%0d%0a</ol>%0d%0a</verbatim>%0d%0a%0d%0aMaybe the leading ...snip..."

-- PTh

This is due to the fact the like Cairo, Dakar compiles the whole topic content before performing TML rendering on it. So the verbatim tag is floating in the middle of the form, and the spec of verbatim is that an unclosed verbatim tag treats the rest of the topic as verbatim.

This is obviously wrong, but the correct fix - to render form data atomically - is high risk. So I'm going to defer this until a proper solution can be coded.

CC

Undeferred, post Dakar CC

---

As is the case with HTML, unclosed tags can indeed cause mayhem. There's no simple answer to this - it's a tradeoff between flexibility and formality. In the light of experience, I think we have to no-action this.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 25 Jun 2010