It's not MediaWiki matter that the references are wrapped into a div with style="height: 220px; overflow: auto"

Seems place for another JS hack to add those properties only if page is not printable.

The correct way to handle this would probably be to use global CSS declarations attached to a class instead of inline styles.

The style sheet (eg in MediaWiki:Common.css) could then define separate, appropriate, behavior for printable and screen views using a @media selector.

Since these are custom styles, that'd be up to authors on the site.

ayg wrote:

Can't reasonably be fixed in the software itself. It's a content issue.

Excuse me for my ignorance and maybe labeling this in the wrong category, but is their a simple way to fix this on just Wikipedia?

Never mind, it's being discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Common.css

Feel free to contribute to the discussion there.

ayg wrote:

*** Bug 10654 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

cragos wrote:

Demo on Wikia:
http://www.wikia.com/index.php?title=Sandbox/testoverflow&printable=yes

Demo on the en wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Mrzaius/sandbox/overflowtest

This affects multiple versions and multiple installations of MediaWiki, and should be disabled in the default CSS. I fail to see how it is appropriate in any way shape or form to require that every installation separately block the overflow tag.

Can reasonably be fixed in the default css files that ship with MediaWiki.

ayg wrote:

(bug 10654 comment #4)

(In reply to comment #3)

There are no legitimate uses of overflow that warrant not disabling it in the
default printable css.

Not true. overflow: hidden;, for instance, is often used to create a new block
formatting context, rather than for its overflow effects (see bug 1629). In
some layouts non-visible overflow values may be the lesser of two evils for
print, if the alternative is to have overtyping or other unpleasant effects.
In the case of overflow: auto or overflow: scroll on a block with a fixed
height, for instance, the correct solution for print is to remove the fixed
height, not remove the overflow; the latter may make the page unreadable by
overprinting.

cragos wrote:

That's true - So why close the bug and not fix it? Is there a way to strip the fixed lengths from the printable versions of MediaWiki-generated articles?

ayg wrote:

No. We cannot possibly figure out in a programmatic fashion what CSS will cause problems on various media. We can't tell from looking at the code whether a fixed-height rule is going to be used to hold limited-height content that will not cause problems for print, variable-height content that will cause problems for print, or variable-height content that will not cause problems for print. We can conceivably ban entire properties if necessary, or particular values of properties (we do that for URLs, for instance, and see bug 9526), but nothing more exact than that. As I've said, we can't restrict any particular values in this case. It requires human intelligence to be applied at the content end.