Last modified: 2014-09-18 19:02:37 UTC
I haven't tried to reproduce this. I copied a page title from Meta and pasted it into VisualEditor on another wiki. The text was set to =Page title= and highlighted in very pale blue, with a dashed line underneath, so I set it to Paragraph (that worked) and went to the character formatting menu to clear the formatting. The 'Language' item was highlighted, so I chose that. The first time, the dialog box that popped up was tiny. It was barely big enough to display the "done" button, which was overlapping with an odd "$1 AUTO" string in gray text. The second time, the dialog box looked normal, but 'Remove' didn't actually remove anything. 'Clear formatting' also doesn't remove anything. Then the box got stuck open. It would go away if I highlighted text, but 'Done' didn't close it and clicking outside it didn't close it. I was able to keep editing and to save the page when I was finished, but it produced <span dir="auto"> tags, which I didn't want.
It looks like page titles (at least on meta, possibly elsewhere) are wrapped in <span dir="auto">, which is recognized as a language annotation (because it has a dir attribute) but doesn't work very well once it's considered a language annotation (because it has no lang attribute). I'll poke at this. Earlier, Amir reported a problem with pages containing <span dir="rtl"> tags (also no lang attribute) so maybe this is semi-related.
Change 160096 had a related patch set uploaded by Catrope: (Kind of) fix treatment of strange dir values https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/160096
Change 160098 had a related patch set uploaded by Catrope: Don't return undefined in ve.init.mw.Platform#getLanguageName https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/160098
Change 160098 merged by jenkins-bot: Don't return undefined in ve.init.mw.Platform#getLanguageName https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/160098
Change 160096 merged by jenkins-bot: (Kind of) fix treatment of strange dir values https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/160096
