87981 - form controls shouldn't be 'vertical-align: bottom'

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Core :: Layout: Form Controls, defect, P1)

Description

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Many of the form controls have 'vertical-align: bottom'.  'bottom' and 'top' are
relative to the line itself rather than to the parent of the element, and they
shouldn't be used for form controls.  I'll attach a testcase that vividly
demonstrates why (the text input is well below the rest of the line of text).

Reasonable possibilities for form controls would probably be 'middle',
'baseline' (especially if they did 'baseline' correctly), or 'text-bottom'.  I'd
have to dig into what 4.x did and what IE does.

Comment 1

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Attachment: testcase showing why 'vertical-align: bottom' form controls are bad

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

FWIW, I ran into this while investigating bug 78066, which would be fixed by
fixing this.

Comment 3

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

This actually dates back to back when we had native form controls.

ua.css:
revision 3.5
date: 1998/05/07 00:06:15;  author: kipp;  state: Exp;  lines: +10 -1
Updated style sheet

Comment 4

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Attachment: testcase to determine behavior of other browsers

Comment 5

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Attachment: testcase to determine behavior of other browsers

Comment 6

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

WinIE 5.5 does 'baseline' alignment (with a slightly offset baseline)
MacIE 5.0 does 'text-bottom' alignment
Netscape 4.x does something between 'baseline' and 'text-bottom' (it's hard to
  tell since it doesn't support 'vertical-align' -- It's basically
  exactly 'baseline' on Linux and closer to 'text-bottom' on Windows, with Mac
  somewhere in between)

Comment 7

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Because I'm a bit worried about baseline doing weird things in Mozilla and
because what it does in Mozilla isn't really 'baseline', I think 'text-bottom'
would be the best choice for now, until we have 'baseline' working correctly. 
I'll attach a patch to switch form controls to 'baseline'.  I think we might
want to get this in to the branch to fix bug 78066.

Comment 8

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Attachment: patch to forms.css (is this the right set of changes?)

Comment 9

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Taking this, since I think it's our best chance to fix bug 78066 for RTM.

Comment 10

[Chris Waterson]

[s]r=waterson

Comment 11

[Marc Attinasi]

r=attinasi

Comment 12

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

Checked in fix to trunk on 2001-07-12 22:19 PDT.  Depending on whether there are
any problems we might want to get this on the branch.  I should also file a bug
on making us use baseline alignment for some of the controls.

Comment 13

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

OK, this has missed the train for the branch.

Comment 14

[jerone]

verified build: 20010724B &20010730T os:win98/mac8.6/Linux7