Margins in MSIE (was font sizes...)

My apologies to anyone who accessed
http://home.earthlink.net/~davidp/dtest.html within the first hour of
my message asking people to do so. I noted some errors, then managed to
add more when I hurriedly fixed the first batch. I revised the page
again this morning, adding some examples with pixel measurements and
larger font, plus a screen capture from the MS site. (I had initially
used the inline style drop shadow example at
http://199.120.83.179/~moreese/msiebugs/style_sheet_bugs/index.html as
a starting point for my own examples but then realized that the markup
there is wrong. I can't detail the error as I can't access that page
this morning. It was the weird results I got when I used that code that
prompted my first message.)

The issue with the left and right margins is that the second example
should look exactly the same as the first, i.e. moving the shadow to
the right should have the same effect as moving the red type to the
left. If you look closely at the example you'll see that is not the
case. What I found was that to get an accurate horizontal offset for a
right side drop shadow on centered text you need to offset the drop
shadow to the right (with a left margin) and the text to the left (with
a right margin).

So, the serious issue is the vertical margin. It is seemingly incorrect
with both point and pixel measurements. As I noted, Microsoft's CSS
Gallery examples of negative margins (such as
http://www.microsoft.com/truetype/css/gallery/slide7.htm ) look awful
on my system. (How awful? See for yourself. I also put a screen capture
of that page at http://home.earthlink.net/~davidp/dtest.html.) I have
a hard time believing this is the intended effect.

David Perrell

Received on Thursday, 1 August 1996 12:43:21 UTC