274810 - Height of absolute block includes floats

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Positioned, defect)

Description

[Phil Endecott]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-2)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 (Debian package 1.0-2)

I have a float:left block inside a postion:absolute block.  By default the
height of the absolute block seems to include the float, which isn't what I was
expecting.  If I have a float in normal flow that is taller than the containing
block it "hangs out the bottom".  For example:

<div (with border)>
  <div style="float:left">FFFFFFFF</div>
  DDDDDDDDDD
</div>

+-----------------+
|F DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD|
+F----------------+
 F
 F
 F

If the outer div is absolutely positioned the border includes the float, which
doesn't seem right:

+-----------------+
|F DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD|
|F                |
|F                |
|F                |
|F                |
+-----------------+

I've encountered this problem because I have other absolutely-positioned
elements in the space to the right of the float that don't see mouse clicks
because they are behind the transparent portion of the div.

position:fixed behaves in the same way (and this is what my real application is
using).

I will attach an example to demonstrate the problem.



Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Phil Endecott]

Attachment: Testcase illustrating problem.

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

This is correct according to CSS2.1.  The absolutely positioned element
establishes a new block formatting context.

Comment 3

[Phil Endecott]

Hi David,

Thanks for the quick response.  I have just found section 10.6.7 of css2.1 - I
was looking at css2 before which does not include this bit.

OK, I'll need to find some other way to make the hidden links work.

Cheers, Phil.