rendering the legend element

Unfortunately there is no standards or even recommendation for 
rendering elements.  This makes it very tricky for the poor designer ;-] ;-]
I guess the best we can hope for is that most browser makers will gradually 
move to making their output look similar....

An easy target for this muddlement of vision is the simple legend element.
MSIE/opera renders it as an inline element and doesn't acknowledge a background style
mozilla does offer background style but places it in a frameset (even when not requested)
Amaya treats it as a block element and does background (GREAT) but calculates its
width as maxing out the element's container  rather than being just the width of the 
content plus box values. It also misaligns the background to the right a fraction.
CAN THIS BE CHANGED IN NEXT VERSION

When a legend is contained by a fieldset which is the norm for form designers, 
MSIE/Opera and mozilla make the legend just wide enough for content PLUS box,
reder the background correctly and then by default left align and vertical middle align
the legend over the fieldset border line. This is very attractive.   Amaya places the
legend inside the fieldset border which agrees with how most elements are handled
but not very attractive.  Can the default behaviour be changed in next version ???

Although rendering is not part of the recommendation and no standard exists,
it would be advantageous if a Visual Editor could construct views that would be
seen by most designers clients browsers.  I guess that means trying to make
things render similar to MSIE (has the population base) whenever it can be done.
Chosing defaults that are similar to MSIE would probably help quite a bit. 

Another element that has issues is the input element especially when used as
type button or type file.   I suspect that form design was not a priority as script
languages are not part of amaya.  but forms still need to be designed   and those
on the net rendered in a reasonable way ....   Just mentioning long outstanding 
work that needs doing to make Amaya a designer's tool
An--
john russell ve3ll@rac.ca [those are L's as in LLAMA]
http://home.cogeco.ca/~ve3ll
http://home.cogeco.ca/~trains
http://home.cogeco.ca/~cipher

Received on Monday, 20 October 2003 07:21:28 UTC