Re: [css-tables] default box-sizing for tables

On 09/26/2014 12:15 PM, Bogdan Brinza wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Another CSS Interoperability issue we've uncovered during Internet Explorer development. We've brought to the group attention several issues already and I think it's worth mentioning that for every such issue we fix dozens of interoperability issues we find in IE internally and based on external feedback.
>
> Now to the subject. While investigating one bug (see reduced snippet - [1] below) we've found that IE and Firefox add "box-sizing: border-box" in UA style sheet. Chrome doesn't and we see some interesting behavior where Chrome does some magic to achieve this behavior somehow with inconsistent results.
>
> CSS 2.1 touches on this here: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/tables.html#separated-borders
>
>> However, in HTML and XHTML1, the width of the <table> element is the distance from the left border edge to the right border edge.
>> Note: In CSS3 this peculiar requirement will be defined in terms of UA style sheet rules and the 'box-sizing' property.
>
> It would be valuable to get WG's clarification on the expectations here, so that we can act accordingly to improve interoperability.
>
> [1] http://jsfiddle.net/q8fwfmpL/

I believe the intent is, as documented in the CSS2.1 note, that table boxes
will use content sizing by default just like everything else, however the
UA will be expected to have

   table { box-sizing: border-box; }

in its UA stylesheet, which can then be overridden. So IE and FF are correct.

The goal here was to reduce the amount of HTML-specific magic that the UA
needs to have built in, and since the back-compat requirement for how
'width' works on tables could be easily solved by 'box-suppress', that was
the WG's intent for CSS3. It was documented into CSS2.1 partly as a heads-up
to CSS2.1 implementers, and partly because we have no reasonable excuse for
a Level 3 Tables module.

What I'm not too clear on is whether that rule needs to be applied to any
internal table elements. That depends only on content-compat concerns, so
perhaps you know. :)

~fantasai

Received on Saturday, 27 September 2014 19:44:12 UTC