180468 - 'display: compact' not implemented

Status: NEW

(Core :: Layout: Block and Inline, enhancement)

Description

[Michal Kubecek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016

Mozilla currently ignores declaration of 'display: compact' in CSS style sheets
as described in CSS level 2 specification, section 9.2.3.
(http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#compact). Elements render as if
'display: block' was specified instead.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. copy example from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#compact
2. open in browser

Actual Results:  
both definitions render as two lines

Expected Results:  
first definition should render as one line according to CSS level 2 specification

This is not duplicate of bug 2055 since this report concerns only CSS
declaration of 'display: compact', not the obsolete 'compact' attribute. In
fact, reporting it separately is exactly what was proposed by Charles C. Fu in
discussion on bug 2055.

Comment 1

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Thanks, but for future reference note that we prefer not to have a bug filed for
every missing feature.

Comment 2

[Michael Lippert]

That seems a little snide Ian. What do you prefer?
I was having this exact problem, came to bugzilla did a search and found this
bug. Now I know it's an open known issue. I didn't think of this as an
enhancement, but rather as something that I expected to work that doesn't. Hence
a bug. Seems reasonable to me.

If there is a bug that is tracking all CSS standard issues that are currently
not working, OK, but it would seem better if that were a tracking bug anyway so
that individual bugs can be marked fixed as they are addressed, rather than
waiting for every CSS issue to be fixed at once.

And if this is part of a standard that Mozilla doesn't support (and I thought it
was supported) it would be nice if I could find that list of standards supported
vs not supported somewhere from the mozilla home page.

Comment 3

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

Sorry, it was not meant to be snide. It's just that if we had one bug per
missing CSS, HTML, XHTML, XML, DOM, RDF, MathML, SVG, namespace, HTTP, etc
feature, we'd be drowning in bugs.

At the moment we are concentrating on fixing our thousands of _bugs_, as opposed
to adding new features. Depth of support (getting each feature right before
moving on to the next one) is more important than breadth (having lots of
features do something, but many of them having awful bugs).

There is no documentation stating what is and isn't supported, because it would
go out of date in a matter of days, and thus nobody has volunteered to try to
keep up with it. (Out of date documentation is worse than no documentation.)

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Note that this display value is not in CSS2.1 (and I have doubts it'll stick
around in CSS3...)

Comment 5

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

'compact' will be in CSS3.

Comment 6

[Martijn]

Even so, display:compact should not be reported as an error in the error console. It's not an error (actually it's completely correct according to specs), it's merely a property FF doesn't understand.

It'd be a mess if a browser reports an error about everything it can't deal with ;)

Comment 7

[Gábor Stefanik]

Is this bug dead? There doesn't seem anything to happen here... The last comment really concerning implementing display:compact is more than 3 and a half years old...

Comment 8

[Gábor Stefanik]

Adding helpwanted and nominating wanted1.9.3? in hope that this will be finally picked up

Comment 9

[Zéfling]

display: compact is no longer present in the specs.