Re: collapsible property

On 2010-02-11 10:33 PM, Daniel Danilatos wrote:
> I've tried it, it doesn't work. The height differs by a few pixels
> when it is empty vs not empty, and the difference is affected by
> line height and other properties. It might be the case that with
> sufficient CSS hackery there will be a brittle solution, but I think
> that's far less desirable than a property that has the exact semantic
> meaning of what is desired.

That "few pixels" is probably the leading and can probably be gotten
around by explicitly specifying the leading (i.e., |line-height|).

> It also doesn't work at all in IE.

Your proposed property will not work in Internet Explorer (the browser
with the longest release cycle) for maybe 3-5 years assuming that such
an idea were adopted. Then you still have to deal with all of the non-IE
browsers which would undoubtedly also have a major lag before they
implement it as well as all of the previous versions of those browsers
and IE. That's what, a decade before it can be used reliably? So the
result would be the same for quite some time.

If this is IE6 you're talking about with its lack of support for
|min-height|, IE6 should just be allowed to die already or you can
insist upon supporting it with your existing solution.

> The fact that the native contentEditable behaviour of webkit, gecko
> and IE all differ in how they solve this (webkit installs a BR when
> the block element is empty, gecko always has a BR, and IE puts a
> magic ) indicates that this is a problem that needs a standard
> solution. They are also buggy, in that they don't always correctly
> employ their respective trick, resulting in collapsed unusable block
> elements (and it is even harder for a javascript application trying
> to control this to figure out when it should employ the trick).

I'm not very familiar with |contentEditable|. Maybe that feature should
be amended at the HTML level if this is behavior that should be built in?

Received on Friday, 12 February 2010 06:52:53 UTC