274831 - absolute positioning used with percents yields incorrect boundaries

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Jeffrey Riaboy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041215 Firefox/1.0+

I used a table element with a position:absolute height=100% (or width).  The 
upper left corner is correct, but the lower left corner goes past the lower 
left edge of the browser (its width tag is of the browser instead of its 
parent.)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
just to show the problem...
<table style=position:absolute border=1 width=100% height=100%
><tr><td>a</td></tr>
to show the problem a little more clearly, in a 2x2 table as the lower right 
cell
<table width=100 height=100><tr width=50><td width=50></td><td 
width=50></td></tr><tr><td></td><td> <table style=position:absolute border=1 
width=100% height=100%><tr><td>a</td></tr> </td></tr>

Actual Results:  
borders are browsers width x browsers height

Expected Results:  
borders should be ~50x50

Comment 1

[hostmanila Sitemanager]

clearly demonstrated in http://www.hostmanila.com/t_fxbug01 (though my problem
is at http://www.audiocompulsion.com, a clean code better demonstrates the problem).

Comment 2

[cyberman]

Attachment: Two divs, one normal, one absolute - width is % of window instead of outer box

Testcase. No table, no Doctype(as irrelevant), plain DIVs, colored border for
visibility.
Tested with Firefox 1.0.4 . Works in IE 6 and Opera 7 .

Comment 3

[Gabriel Sjoberg]

The behavior you are seeing is correct as defined by the CSS 2.1 specification.
 The section of interest is 9.6 Absolute Positioning [1].  As stated there,
absolutely positioned boxes are "removed from the normal flow entirely" and a
new box is created.

Marking this bug as INVALID.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#absolute-positioning

Comment 4

[Nick Johnson]

(In reply to comment #3)
> The behavior you are seeing is correct as defined by the CSS 2.1 specification.
>  The section of interest is 9.6 Absolute Positioning [1].  As stated there,
> absolutely positioned boxes are "removed from the normal flow entirely" and a
> new box is created.

More relevant is 9.8.4, where it states "The containing block for a positioned
box is established by the nearest positioned ancestor (or, if none exists, the
initial containing block, as in our example)". Thus, setting the outer div in
the example to 'position: relative' correctly causes the inner box to become a
percentage of that width instead of window width.