Height means nothing on a span tag

Post #196,599

2/28/05 9:07:21 AM

Unless you change the properties of the span, a span tag is an inline element and height should be ignored. IE is simply wrong to even consider it.

For the DIV case, with overflow set to auto, there seems to be a mininum size that an object has to be before Firefox will put the scroll bars in. I didn't work out the exact point, but if you put more text in the block and set the pixel height to 100px the scroll bars will show up. This is technically allowed under the CSS 2.1 spec, since auto means it is up to the browser to decide how to handle it.

Oddly enough, on my computer IE does put the scroll bar on the text in the XHTML DIV case. I have no idea why it would show up on some computers and not on others.

Jay

Post #196,604

by ChrisR

2/28/05 9:43:14 AM

Makes sense for the most part

But the last question is why the XHTML acts different for DIV elements than the HTML 4.0 transitional documents? This occurs in both browsers and I'm not sure why the change.

Also, while I'm at it: Is there a DOM way of doing things with regard to measuring coordinates relative to the viewable area? What I need is to measure the view resolution but the following attributes are not DOM'd:

offsetHeight
clientHeight
clientWidth
offsetWidth
clientTop
clientWidth

So without these, how is one supposed to know how to do calculations on where the element is and where it should be.

Post #196,610

by JayMehaffey

2/28/05 11:06:35 AM

Re: Makes sense for the most part

But the last question is why the XHTML acts different for DIV elements than the HTML 4.0 transitional documents? This occurs in both browsers and I'm not sure why the change.

I'm not sure about your specific example, but there are a lot of little differences between XHTML and HTML 4.x in the obscure corners of the language. This is not always because of differences in the standards. Both Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation took XHTMl as a chance to fix some long standing bugs in their rendering that they didn't fix previously because it would break existing pages.

Jay

Post #196,616

by ChrisR

2/28/05 11:35:12 AM

Know it fixes problems related to well-formedness

But I ran the 4 examples though the W3C validator and they all check out. Which begs the question of why the height attribute on the DIV tag is ignored in the XHTML document.

Post #196,625

by JayMehaffey

2/28/05 12:05:05 PM

Seems to be the lack of unit identifier

The CSS spec requires that measurements have a unit identifier, such as px for pixels or pt for points.

It appears to be a case where Firefox just assumes pixels when rendering HTML but ignores the incorrect declaration when rendering in XHTML. This passes the W3 validator because the CSS validator is a seperate utility.

If you put ".div {height:20;width:100%;overflow:auto;}" into the CSS validator it kicks it out for not having a unit on the height.

Jay

Post #196,627

by ChrisR

2/28/05 12:07:48 PM

That was what I was trying to grok. Thanks.

Post #196,721

by static

2/28/05 10:39:10 PM

Have a rummage in here.

[link|http://www.quirksmode.org/|http://www.quirksmode.org/]

There's info in there about positioning and locating elements. Hint: it's not easy.

Wade.

Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed

Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please

-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne.

Welcome to IWETHEY!