strike style not correctly applied to sub and sup elements

Hello,

I don't participate regularly and HIGHLY prefer forums for this type of communication therefore I'll mention that I do not use this email address often (once every few weeks to months) so any replies to me directly should be directed through my site (look up JAB Creations).

I have encountered problems with styling in Gecko/Firefox and Presto/Opera where <s><sub>text</sub></s> and <s><sup>text</sup></s>. The strike-through appears as an underline or an overline. Visually this is how I would interpret it with or without a comparison and I can't tell the difference unless I construct the examples first.

As is being discussed here on the Gecko/Firefox bug report Gecko "correctly" implements the spec however it's clear the spec itself is incorrect...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=695442

The strike through only VISUALLY appears as a strike-through if the strike is at the vertically-centered regardless of the text's own vertical positioning.

To disregard human interpretation of the visual application only creates a disconnect between perception and statement.

The desired and correct application of the strike-through styling is implemented in Internet Explorer 8 and Safari 5.1 on Windows XP.

Here is some sample XHTML (application/xhtml+xml)...

***************************
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
<head>
<title>Test Case</title>
<style type="text/css">
p {font-size: 64px;}
</style>
</head>

<body>

<p>normal text <s><sub>sub test text</sub><sup>sup test text</sup></s> normal text</p>

<p>normal text <sub style="text-decoration: overline;">sub test text</sub><sup style="text-decoration: underline;">sup test text</sup> normal text</p>

</body>
</html>
***************************

 - John Bilicki

Received on Wednesday, 19 October 2011 10:09:53 UTC