29237 - Need constistent model for padding on "Containers" an margins on "children" in dialogs

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core :: XUL, defect, P3)

Description

[Charles Manske]

It is impossible to contstruct a complex dialog and have widgets line up 
correctly or to have consistent inter-widget spacing without extra rules to 
compensate for default padding and margin values in global.css.
Here the important margin and padding data:
titledbuttons.push:
  margin: 0px 3px 2px 4px;
html:input[typ=text]"
  margin: 0px 3px 2px 4px;
radio and checkboxes buttons have
  margin: 3px 5px 3px 3px;
  margin: 3px 5px 4px 3px;
html:select widget (list and combobox)
  margin 0px;
html:label
  0px; 0px; 4px; 0px;
text
  0px;
Based on just this, the inconsistent left margins make it difficult to line up 
widgets in a mixed situation.

The padding in "containers" greatly interact with above margins to affect 
placement of widget inside:
- Dialog border still has the bug that forces us to use 0px
- Tabpanel:
  padding: 5px;
- HTML:Fieldset: 
  margin: 5px; 5px; 6px; 6px;
  padding: 5px;
- Titledbox (prefered replacement for fieldset)
  padding: 5px; 5px; 2px; 5px;
  margin: 2px;
Note that many of these problems would be solved if we had a grid layout system
that would remove the interaction between individual widget margins and their
container's padding, except for the padding inside of each "cell" (a 
grid-box), allowing us to have minimal consistent padding in all
containers, and minimal consistent margins on all internal or child widgets

Comment 1

[german]

Yes we need a grid box or 2-D box system. The margins that were attached to the 
widgets were from before we had a decent box system and were intended to let 
widgets poistions themselves in an aligned way without developers having to do 
anything. we should probably remove these hardcoded margins and replace them with 
a standardized system of hor and vert springs (spacers) using CSS classes that 
can be used until we have a spring/box grid. Some of this is related to the bug 
that does not allow us to have any padding on XUL window elements.

Comment 2

[Jim Roskind]

This does not appear to be an M15 stability checkpoint blocker... so I'm moving 
this to M16 now.

Comment 3

[Eli Goldberg]

QA Assigning non-confidential New/Assigned User Interface: Design Feedback bugs 
to Matthew Thomas ([e-mail]).

Matthew Thomas is now the QA owner for the User Interface: Design Feedback 
component. (Bugs that involve UI issues in the Netscape-branded Mozilla browser 
should continue be QA assigned to [e-mail].)

Comment 4

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

-> jrgm

Comment 5

[shuang (gone)]

Move to M18 for after PR2 work.

Comment 6

[german]

marking worksforme as 'Grid' is now available and should be used for dialog 
spacing. For examples look at recently redesigned dialogs like "Find"