Closed Bug 64874 Opened 24 years ago Closed 18 years ago

No underline of links on letters that go "below the line" (eg., p, q, j etc.) (text-decoration, descenders)

Categories

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

()

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 156881
Future

People

(Reporter: mark.slater, Unassigned)

References

(Depends on 1 open bug)

Details

(Keywords: css3, fonts, Whiteboard: [CSS1-5.4.3])

Attachments

(5 files)

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT)
BuildID:    2001010820

Underlined words with letters that go "below the line" (p, q, j, etc.) 
shouldn't have underline on those letters, to enhance readability. IIRC, 
Macintosh Netscape 4.x did this.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load first attachment below
2. Guess how it's spelt.
3. Give up and mouse-over the links to find out how it's spelt.

Expected Results:  See second attachment
Attached file Attachment #1
Attached image Attachment #2
confirming
Status: UNCONFIRMED → NEW
Ever confirmed: true
Note that from a CSS point of view this does NOT violate the spec. It was even
briefly discussed at the last working group face-to-face -- UAs are quite within
their rights to break the underlining so as not to overwrite descenders.

Marking dependency on bug 1777; we really should fix that first, but when doing
so we should keep this in mind.
Assignee: asa → erik
OS: Windows NT → All
Priority: -- → P5
QA Contact: doronr → ian
Hardware: PC → All
Summary: No underline of links on letters that go "below the line" (eg., p, q, j etc.) → No underline of links on letters that go "below the line" (eg., p, q, j etc.) (text-decoration, descenders)
Target Milestone: --- → Future
Mark, as a work around you might try this:

a:link {
	font-family: verdana, arial;
	color: black;
	text-decoration: none;
	border-bottom : thin solid Black;
	font-size:12px;
}

And then you don't have that kind of probems!
Yep, this problem doesn't really appear on font sizes > 10px, as you can then 
see the below-line part of the letter.

Of course, there are a myriad of workarounds, one with a seperate CSS class 
with the same attributes as the link, but changing the text-decoration to none, 
and then putting it all together as <a href="bla"><span 
class="nounderline">g</span>oodb<span class="nounderline">y</span>e</a>, but 
it'd be really cool if mozilla does this out-of-the-box :-)
Attached file Example
Yes that would be fine Mark, but this also works for 10px, please take a look at
attachment 22298 [details]. That looks exceptable to me, and to you?
Yeah, they look readable to me, but I think this not underlining the letters
with decenders should be seriously considered because the default is that it's
unreadable for a 10px font.

Also note that H-J's example doesn't work the same as IE 5 as it does in Mozilla
so many people will be unwilling to use this workaround. (IE 5 doesn't underline
these links).

I'll attach a screenshot showing how H-J's example is rendered in both moz
(bottom) and IE (top)
In good old 4.x on Windows it just ignores the CSS rules so the last example you 
can't see the bits below the line either.

Any idea why 4.x Mac had this feature and the Windows one didn't? Please put it 
in, we need it :)

You've got my vote slater
H-J: great testcase. Unfortunately, next to the comments from David on how IE
and Netscape 4.x handle this, I also think you can count the number of HTML
writers who would actually implement this kind of work-around on one hand. As I
said before, there's lots of ways to get AROUND this problem, but it'd just be
nice if moz would do it WITHOUT the HTML writer having to worry about these
problems. That and the fact that it would be a really neat effect :-)
First of all I do agree that this has to be implemented into Mozilla. And to be
sure you all know what I mean with that testcase:

Yes I do know that IE does this differently. But that's for a lot of thinks to
CSS, HTML and DOM. My little testcase only shows that there's a *private* work
around, that's all. And if you have difficulties while reading underlined text,
as I did with it, then that you can change the CSS file used by Mozilla, so that
*you* at least will see the difference. I'm not saying this is the solution for
this problem. I'm only saying that this solution is my *private* solution for
this specific CSS problem of Mozilla!

Until Mozilla is changed I'm using this work around also on several websites.
But only because I'm using MG_FastInsertStyleSheet("name.css") And this
functions checks current browser version, and then inserts the pre-selected CSS.
I have to do this in order to support "text readers" and other improvements for
Section 508 and WAI support for specific websites!
I think this is a Mac vs. Windows thing.  I believe the Mac underlines
"properly", with underlines not cutting through descenders of letters, while
Windows and Unix simply draw a line, even if it messes up the descender.
http://www.access.ch/power/infoservices/TidBits/TidBits523.html has a note about
Tasman, the IE rendering engine, not handling this properly.  But it's been a
while since I've used a Mac and I may just be remembering wrong.
We cannot use OS level features for underlining text because CSS has some very
specific requirements for how to underline, see bug 1777.

BTW: We agree there are workarounds, but could discussion regarding such go to
a newsgroup like n.p.m.layout instead of adding the off-topic comments to 
Bugzilla? Thanks!
leave it as future
erik resign. reassign all his bug to ftang for now.
Assignee: erik → ftang
mark all future new as assigned after move from erik to ftang
Status: NEW → ASSIGNED
Whiteboard: [CSS1-5.4.3]
This enhancemnet would be very, er, challenging,to implement if the patch for
1777 goes in. If it does, the place to do it is
nsHTMLContainerFrame::PaintTextDecorationLines() and nsBlockFrame ditto. It
would involve walking along the children of the frame, checking whether any
characters extends below the baseline. In unicode, I might add -- so a german
double s should probably break the line, too. And that's only the beginning. If
the text is raised 0.1 em from the underlining, should the underline still be
broken? How about 1em? 100em?

Another observation: The problem with readability exist only in relative low
resolution for relative small fonts. Both have a tendency to increase over time,
so I'd think that the problem would go away in time. Indeed, the testcases
attached presented no problem for me (1600x1200, Linux/KDE2)

I suggest this be marked WONTFIX. 
We'll have to implement this when we do the CSS3 Text Module, as CSS3 will most
likely have a property to toggle this behaviour.
Assignee: ftang → nobody
Status: ASSIGNED → NEW
Component: Browser-General → Layout: Fonts and Text
Depends on: css-text-3
Priority: P5 → --
Examples in Hindi and Thai (with pictures)

Bug 56881 : Underline should skip character/part-of-character that is below the base line (text-decoration-mode)

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 156881 ***
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 18 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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