Why do you need a   in IE for this break to work?

Question

I wrote this bit of code because I wanted images to appear in the same place regardless of how many bullet points the user fills out in the CMS. IF they don't fill in a spot for a bulleted link or text, it just puts a break rule. What I don't get is why IE requires a   before the break rule for the break rule to take effect. It worked fine Chrome, FF, and Opera without it. What I'm referring to is in the statement.

<cfif len(promos.link1text) gt 0 AND len(promos.link1url) gt 0>
<li><a href="#promos.link1url#">#promos.link1text#</a></li>
<cfelseif len(promos.link1url) gt 0>
<li><a href="#promos.link1url#">#promos.link1url#</a></li>
<cfelseif len(promos.link1text) gt 0>
<li>#promos.link1text#</li>
<cfelse>&nbsp;<br/> </cfif>

Answer 1

That code will generate invalid HTML - a <ul> or <ol> cannot directly contain a <br /> tag. This is probably why you're getting inconsistent results.

And Randy is right - there should be a space in the <br /> - although I wouldn't have thought that was what was causing the problem.

Answer 2

In addition, you will want to run your code through validation to see what syntax improvements you can make:

http://validator.w3.org/check/referer