422128 - white-space:pre; ignored in <select><option>s

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect)

Description

[Ric Shepard]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 SeaMonkey/1.1.8
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9b4) Gecko/2008030318 Firefox/3.0b4

Pre-formatted text is incorrectly displayed in <select> <option>s.
This problem does not exist in Firefox 2.x.x or Seamonkey 1.x.x.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. create a <select> element with <option> elements using style="white-space:pre;"
2.
3.
Actual Results:  
The <select> <option> elements will be displayed as if the style is white-space:normal.

Expected Results:  
The <select> <option> elements would be displayed as pre-formatted text, as is expected from elements with style="white-space:pre;".

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Hmm.  The problem is that white-space does two things: control space-collapsing behavior and control wrapping.  Right now we have

  option { white-space: nowrap !important }

in forms.css because options should never be wrapping.  But then you can't change the whitespace-collapsing behavior, which is what you want to do here.

I suppose we could just remove that style and let options do whatever the <select> is doing, with it defaulting to "white-space: nowrap" as it does now.  Or we could remove the !important and let pages that really care style the options by hand.  Or we could leave things as they are.

David, do you have a preference?

Comment 2

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Attachment: Testcase for some of this stuff

Behavior in various browsers:

Gecko 1.8:  Setting white-space:pre preserves whitespace.  Setting "white-space: normal" leaves min-width as pref-width but allows options to wrap if width is less than the min-width.

Opera 9.25: white-space is treated as "nowrap" just like on trunk.

Comment 3

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

Safari 3:  Same as Opera 9.25 and Gecko trunk.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

David says IE7 has the same behavior as trunk Gecko, Safari, and Opera as well.  Given that, I think we want the behavior we have now.