border on broken line boxes (was Re: 14.2.1 'background-position' - block level only?)

> From: Hakon Lie <howcome@w3.org> 
...
>Ian Hickson wrote:
>
> > The problem which can come up is what to do with broken line boxes.
> >

Speaking of broken line boxes, it does not seem clear from the CSS2 spec how
a conforming user agent is supposed to render borders on broken line boxes
(maybe I just missed that page out of the 300+ pp. :-).  I can think of a
few alternatives:

- render a complete border on each individual broken line box.  This may
result in the bottom border of one broken line box overlapping the top
border of the next broken line box (or should there be extra vertical spaced
laid out between the two to make room for both borders?).  This is probably
relatively easy to implement, yet probably doesn't look quite right, or
quite the way an author may expect.

- render a border "around" the area defined by the union of the broken line
boxes.  (So what do you do where a broken line box starts at the very end of
a line, and continues to just the beginning of the next line, such that the
two broken line boxes have no adjacency?).  This alternative seems to be
what an author might expect, yet it has the previously mentioned problem
case, and is more challenging to implement (especially the 270 degree
corners).

- render a border "around" the "bounding box" of the area defined by the
union of the broken line boxes.  This may appear confusing as there will
likely be content "inside" the border which wasn't semantically supposed to
have a border.  Again this seems relatively easy to implement, yet is
probably not what is expected.

- force the element to be display:block, then render the border accordingly.
 This just seems like a bad idea, as I can easily see that someone might
want to render a border around a word or two in a paragraph, without causing
any line breaks etc.

Opinions?  Other alternatives?  What did the authors have in mind when they
said that "border" applies to "all elements"?

Regards,

Tantek Çelik
Internet Explorer for Macintosh
tantekc@microsoft.com

Received on Monday, 7 September 1998 18:01:12 UTC