Format showing differently for different users

[Planeshunter]

It happened with one of my posts that a ruby text format seemed to work perfectly for me, but some (and only some) other users saw it differently. The problem is solved now and was about an unclosed format tag that the forum seemed to interpret creatively. Thing is, it still doesn't explain why some people could see it formatted just fine and some other people saw it behaving oddly.

It only just occurs to me that a copy of the text might've been useful, but I can't do anything about it now that's already corrected. Hope that making the issue known is still better than nothing.

Here and a couple posts below are screenshots of the text behaving strangely and normally respectively.

By the way, considering how the tags ended up being placed, it should have looked weird for everyone, so I'd say people like me who saw it looking fine are the headscratchers here.

 

[alethiophile]

This is probably related to different browsers. The [rt] tag gets translated directly into the corresponding HTML, and if HTML is structurally invalid then browsers make their own decisions about how to handle it which may be different.