- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 15:25:44 -0500
- To: public-html@w3.org, Shelley Powers <shelleyp@burningbird.net>
I'm promoting this to a top-level thread, to make sure it gets read by people even if they've ignored the bikeshed threads elsewhere on similar subjects. Leif has discovered a *major* rendering bug resulting from using dt/dd in figure/details that makes them virtually unusable in IE6, IE7, and IE8-as-IE7. Here is a minimal test-case demonstrating the error (cribbed from Leif's email): <!doctype html> <script> document.createElement("figure"); </script> <style> body{ background: silver; color: #800; margin: 0; text-align: center; } figure { display: block; background: green !important; color: white !important; text-align: center; border: black dotted 4px; } dt, dd { border: #800 solid 4px; color: #88f; } </style> <p>Gray background represents the body elment</p> <figure> <dt>dd/dt element inside figure</dt> <p>content inside figure</p> </figure> <p>content outside figure</p> <p>more content outside figure</p> Load that code in any legacy IE, or in IE8 with the IE7 rendering engine or quirks mode. You'll see that while the text color and border of the <dt> are being transmitted to *all following content, both within and without the <figure>*. As well, the border on <dt> envelops all further content, crossing the <figure>'s border. Essentially, as soon as IE encounters a <dt> (or <dd>, the same thing happens) outside of <dl>, it switches to a strange mode in its CSS parser and subsequently treats all following content on the page as a child of the <dt> for the purposes of most/all CSS properties. Curiously, the DOM of the page is just fine (as exposed by IE8's Developer Tools). So it's just something in the styling subsystem that is crafting a malformed view of the document. However, this error is a completely killer of the dt/dd-within-figure/details proposal. The legacy problems are nearly equal to those of <legend>. I, for one, *certainly* expect to use set borders and fonts on my <details> toggler, but if that will screw up the entirety of the rest of my page in IE7 (or in IE8 if I get tagged as needing compat mode for whatever reason), I simply won't use it until IE7 is irrelevant. I don't expect that day to come for years yet. It appears, then, that if we want <figure> and <details> to be usable on any reasonable timeframe, the only solution is a new element, or an attribute as I suggested elsewhere. Pretty much all existing elements have been exhausted at this point, I believe. ~TJ
Received on Friday, 18 September 2009 20:26:42 UTC