HTML generated for section macro suddenly changed

[Jonathan Simonoff]

A few days ago, we started seeing formatting differences in a number of places in the wiki. I tracked them down, and most involve the section macro. We have a staging server with the same content and software version, and that one does not show the change, so I've been able to compage the generated HTML.

Before, the section macro generated tables. Now, the section macro generated divs that use the display attribute to make them behave similar to tables. This ends up rendering the page differently in certain circumstances, causing problems for many of our users.

My question is: did Atlassian push out some kind of change in the section macro recently that caused this? I haven't been able to determine if someone had installed a plugin update (it isn't clear to me which plugin contains the section macro), and that contained the change, or if this happened some other way.

[Jonathan Simonoff · Accepted solution]

Found the reason -- someone had updated the Layout Macros in our installation. The information in the plugin manager says that the update switches from using tables to using divs.

The problem for us happens because people put text inside the section macro before the first column. That is not a logical thing to do, but before it produced a result people wanted -- the paragraph just appeared above the columns. With the new implementation, the initial paragraph ends up being another column, even though you didn't use a column macro. FWIW, I'd say this is the correct behavior. The prolem comes because LOTS of people got away with doing the wrong thing before, not knowing it was wrong since it looked fine.