Re: CSS 2: Table Cells and the "line-height" Property

From: Eric Meyer <emeyer@theopalgroup.com>
Subject: Re: CSS 2: Table Cells and the "line-height" Property
Date: Fri, Mar 30, 2001, 1:19 PM

>     So: how about asking implementors to include a UA style which
> states something along the lines of:
>
>     td > img, th > img {vertical-align: bottom;}
>
> Would that be terribly inappropriate?

Perhaps not inappropriate, but insufficient.

What happens when you have two or more images in a table cell?

It appears to work then.

However, add a single character of text in between the images.

Now the flaw is revealed, and you have images bottom aligning with the text
on the line, which is not what occurs in traditional HTML presentation.

Unfortunately, there is no CSS selector for "if there is text on this line".

This why we need 'line-height:normal' "do the right thing"* instead of a
brainless/useless "some value between 1.0 and 1.2".

> It covers the situation we
> have here

Barely, but then quickly breaks down.

> and while one could argue that authors ought to be doing
> this, perhaps this is one area where we could just not bother them.

Totally agreed with that.

Asking authors to add styling just to have "typical" behaviors which used to
be automatic is ludicrous.

Another way of saying this, exactly what is the reasoning behind making an
obtuse case the default?

> This also keeps implementors from having to do things like
> special-case table cells to treat 'line-height: normal' as
> 'line-height: 0', which strikes me as technically valid but also a
> horrible twisting of the specification's intent.  And yes, I do care
> about intent, or else I wouldn't be trying to fix this at all.

100% agreed.

Tantek

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Received on Friday, 30 March 2001 17:13:41 UTC