TYPO3 Core

Can anyone point me in the right direction on where to look in the code?

OK, did some additional investigations. The tag parameters are reversed when the existing content is loaded from the DB into the RTE for editing. Disabling the RTE will show the content correctly in the editing form.

Important finding: It only happens in Google Crome, not in FireFox! Apparently there is a JS function that parses the tags. You can also see the problem when hitting the 'show html' button in the RTE toolbar. In Chrome you will see the parameters swapping around.

I've found the root of the problem. The problem lies in the getAttributes function in htmlarea.js. This function uses the DOM method node.attributes to get the list of attributes of a node, parse them, and then pass them through to reconstruct tags with the fetched attributes.
However, the method .attributes returns a NamedNodeMap which is not an array. See this definition:

.attributes is a collection of all attribute nodes registered to the specified node. It is a NamedNodeMap,not an Array, so it has no Array methods and the Attr nodes' indexes may differ among browsers.

So this method should not be used for such processes, as the order will not reflect the original order in the source, and differs among browsers. Unfortunately there are no other methods to get all attributes from a node. I also tried to just alter the nodes directly instead of dismantling them and rebuilding them later on, but then I bumped into the problem that there is no uniform method to convert a node to flat html (outerHTML doesn't work in FF).

So in the end, the only solution I could come up with is to just sort everything alphabetically all the time. This will result in some funky html, but at least it is consistent. I will provide a patch next week.

Patch set 1 of change Ib5f46fc0399afbbfd4b436fc5aee75fe52f7ac10 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/5379

Patch set 2 of change Ib5f46fc0399afbbfd4b436fc5aee75fe52f7ac10 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/5379

Patch set 1 of change I4686dc9a1a0a7a81b06ee6b6430371e86b593817 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/5535

Patch set 1 of change I8de914e0f10b043c106c1cacba3e17579d43e699 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/5536

Please test this change: http://review.typo3.org/5536

Patch set 2 of change I4686dc9a1a0a7a81b06ee6b6430371e86b593817 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/5535

Patch set 2 of change I8de914e0f10b043c106c1cacba3e17579d43e699 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/5536