Re: Issue with legend content wrapping to fieldset width?

Mirabella, Mathew J wrote:

>All.
>
>I am tweeking my online survey application.  In surveys where there are sets of radio buttons or other grouped controls, I am using fieldset and I am using the legend text as the overall label for that set of controls.  For items that are single text boxes or textareas, I am using normal paragraph text for the labels.
>
>Using CSS, i have specified widths for the paragraphs used as labels for form controls and also fieldsets and legends as they are used so that all content is 100% of the screen width.
>
>However, while the paragraph text seems to wrap when it is too long for one screen width, the legend text does not.  Thus, with long group labels in legends, the page requires a degree of horizontal scrolling.  I wish to avoid this and ensure that the legend text does in fact wrap.
>
>Does anyone know how this can be done, short of using a div inside the legend itself?
>
>I am primarily using IE 5.5 / 6.  I wonder if this is another css bug/issue with the browser?
>
>Mat.
>  
>

My first guess is that it is fieldset's poor support in most browsers, 
it would almost have to be the most poorly supported element, and after 
all, it is probably close to the least used.

Once you start implicitly defining CSS classes within the fieldset it is 
probably not going to have the power or hooks for any inheritance of css 
hierarchy to apply properly.

Suggested Workaround: I'd try dropping any CSS class reference to 
anything specifically withing the fieldset and see if it wraps 
naturally.  If not, apply the same class to the fieldset.  This maybe 
one that is not solvable, but I think there should be others on this 
list that have worked with this a bit more than me and do have solutions.

Fieldset also causes Javascript to not work in certain browsers cause 
for some reason (poor implementation) fieldset can cause DOM hiccups.

Geoff

Received on Friday, 9 January 2004 15:45:18 UTC