26788 - topmargin and leftmargin attributes in body tag are ignored

Status: VERIFIED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout, defect, P2)

Description

[Timothy McClanahan]

Equivalent functionality is present with the 'marginheight' and 'marginwidth' 
attributes, even though 'topmargin' and 'leftmargin' were implemented in 
Internet Explorer LONG (LOOOONG) before these were added to Navigator. It should 
be a trivial matter to map those functions to the equivalent MSIE attributes to 
maximize compatibility. Obviously a stupid political decision on the part of 
previous Navigator teams - this should be fixed before launch. Embarrassing and 
childish, quite frankly.

If individual settings for top, bottom, left & right don't exist - that would be 
a nice enhancement if someone is feeling bored. *grin*

Comment 1

[troy]

Re-assigning to Kipp's bug list

Comment 2

[buster]

won't have a chance to look at this until M16.

Comment 3

[buster]

mine! mine mine mine!  all mine!  whoo-hoo!

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

A site that doesn't show up well in netscape 4.7 or in mozilla because of this 
bug: http://www.nw.net/mars/

Comment 5

[buster]

I've started a thread on n.p.m.layout about this.  We'll get some comment, and 
see what the pro's and con's are.  The code would be pretty straightforward.

Comment 6

[buster]

Marking WONTFIX for now.  My reasoning is:
1)These are IE-proprietary attributes, and we're pushing standards compliance.  
There are clear and easy standards compliant ways of achieving the same effect.
2)Consistency for web developers is very important, and if we can't support them 
all, we shouldn't support any.

Counter-arguments that I sympathize with are:
1)Adding these is very easy
2)Some web developers would appreciate us magically making their pages work the 
same in IE and mozilla/NS6 without them having to change anything
3)We'll get fewer bug reports if more pages lay out "as expected."

To re-open this (and similar) bugs, what we need is a comprehensive list of all 
the IE-specific attributes.  Then, someone will have to do an analysis to 
determine the cost of supporting them all (or maybe "the commonly used ones", 
whatever that means?)  I expect most will be like these, trivial.

A thread on this has been started in n.p.m.layout ("topmargin and leftmargin"), 
please comment there so we can have this discussion among a broad audience.

Comment 7

[Chris Petersen]

Marking verified won't fix based on last comments.

Comment 8

[Jesse Ruderman]

> 3)We'll get fewer bug reports if more pages lay out "as expected."

/me waves his "bug 6211!" sign

Comment 9

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

*** Bug 9258 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***