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I discovered a small bug in the rendering of HTML in R8. It was discovered when a user was opening forms sent to a shared mailbox on an R8 server.

The Problem
Lotus Notes R8 was overlapping fields when rendering a table in the browser.

Here is what the user saw on an R8 server:

Here is what it looks like in R6:

The Cause
Spanned table cells/rows. In R8 (or possibly R7) Lotus decided it would help us out by rendering empty table rows (TR tags) with a style of “display:none.” Unfortunately, this affects rows that are being used by the ROWSPAN tag.

Here are the merged cells in the Notes Designer:

Here are the split cells:

In the browser (both versions) Notes tries to render the tables with a series of COLSPAN and ROWSPAN tags to render the table exactly the way it is displayed in the designer.

Here is the HTML from the R6 version:

2. Company #: (3 digits)  

Cost Center #: (7 digits)








Phone Number:(
 ) 
 -






Fax Number:(
 ) 
 -

Here is the HTML from the R8 version:

2. Company #: (3 digits)  

Cost Center #: (7 digits)








Phone Number:(
 ) 
 -






Fax Number:(
 ) 
 -

Notice the


tags? I am no HTML expert but it seems to cause issues with the ROWSPAN for cost center.

The Solution
We’re screwed. Seriously. Only testing will discover these strange renderings. I fixed the problem above by deleting the three unnecessarily merged rows. Hopefully, this was a freak occurance but be aware of how R8 is rendering your HTML.

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