On Commons the widely-used Template:Information contains code for
machine-readibility. It takes the parameters and puts them in urlencoded
form to the title attribute of a hidden <span>, so scripts can easily
read them (at least I guess that's what it's for, the
"machine-readibility code" is not documented well).
Now the parameters of Template:Information can get quite long. It seems
that if the urlencoded string is longer than 33,xxx characters, it
breaks. See for example
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:World_homosexuality_laws.svg&oldid=19428970>
(at the bottom of the description).
The problem is not in the template or in the source of that specific
file. It happens to all very long attributes. The whole <span> is
corrupted in the HTML source code. I guess, the problem is in the parser
or in tidy. Does anybody know, what's the exact reason and how to fix it?
Marcus Buck
User:Slomox