87391 - Whitespace is not properly discarded inside element tags

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Core :: CSS Parsing and Computation, defect)

Description

[Greg K.]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC; en-US; rv:0.9.1) Gecko/20010607
BuildID:    2001060712

Whitespace immediately inside element tags is apparently not discarded when CSS2
:before and :after pseudoelements are applied.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load the attached testcase into the Mozilla browser component.

Actual Results:  Whitespace is displayed between the exlamation point applied
:before and :after the "div" element and those applied :before and :after the
"p" elements.

Expected Results:  No whitespace should appear between the exclamation points.

Mozilla is preserving the whitespace between the trailing </p> of p#b and the
</div>, and displays it between the :after content of each. Said whitespace
should be discarded.

Since there's no whitespace between the initial "<div>" and the '<p id="a">',
none is displayed.

Comment 1

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Example of nondiscarded whitespace.

Comment 2

[Greg K.]

Attachment: Even more simplified testcase.

Comment 3

[Jason Johnston]

Can you point to a section in the W3C specs that says this whitespace should be
discarded?  I looked but couldn't find any.  

It's not clear either way in the section on generated content, but since the
initial value of 'display' for generated content is 'inline', then we should
apply the rules for whitespace handling in inline elements.  Those rules are
very clear that the whitespace is significant.

But like I said if there's somewhere in the spec that says otherwise, please
point to it here so we can reference it.

Comment 4

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

I'm with Jason on this -- why should we remove those spaces?

Comment 5

[Greg K.]

Is any and all whitespace inside a block element treated as an anonymous inline
block? As a simple case, consider <div> foo </div>.

If so, then the existing rule seems to be that if it is leading or trailing
whitespace, it is inconsequential and shall not be displayed, even though it is
not discarded at parse time, but rather at layout time. In the example, only
"foo" would be rendered with no leading or trailing whitespace.

However, applying :before or :after content to the DIV adds something before or
after the whitespace, and so the whitespace becomes significant, doesn't it? In
that case, this bug is in error and may be closed as INVALID.

Thanks for the discussion.

Comment 6

[Jason Johnston]

That is exactly how I understand it, Greg.  Well said.

Comment 7

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

That's how I understand it too. Marking INVALID, feel free to VERIFY if you 
agree, or REOPEN if you don't.