Re: Block-level formatting and width in Netscape 6

Philip Hoyt <phoyt@mspect.com> wrote:

>> "The box width is given by the sum of the left and right margins,
>> border, and padding, and the content width"

> would make a bug out of the Mozilla scrollbar problem. 

I don't think so, because the 'width' property in CSS sets what's
referred to here as the the content width, not the box width. If,
eg. 'width: 100%; padding: 10%', the content width is 100%, and the
box width is 120%, so Mozilla must scroll.

> position: absolute; left: 100% also behaves differently from how
> I would expect.

I'm not sure if the way Mozilla(*) draws the content of such a box
but not its background is correct, but the positioning seems OK.

(See also the erratum for section 9.3.2; the original spec would
make things far more confusing if followed to the letter.)

How would you expect, then?

(* or at least, the last nightly I downloaded.)

> Compare this to the behaviour of left: 100% in background images
> where the 100% is measured from the right edge

I suspect you mean 'background-position'; it's an unrelated use
of percentages (there's a lot of that in CSS, eh?) which doesn't
use 'left' or 'right'. I suppose it looks similar if you set
'background-repeat: no-repeat', but it isn't really. :-)

> Similar techniques behave in a much more useful manner in
> css-free html (<table width="100%"> for example).

I do agree that the CSS way is somewhat less convenient,
because it makes it difficult to mix percentages and inflexible
units together in the box model (short of using nested elements,
which is a bit disappointing for content-style-separation
enthusiasts).

Er... HTML's table borders were damnably ugly, though, eh?

-- 
Andrew Clover
Technical Consultant
1VALUE.com AG

Received on Wednesday, 18 April 2001 13:11:39 UTC