93060 - [ABS POS]{ib} Absolute placement broken when container is empty

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 79315

(Core :: Layout: Block and Inline, defect)

Description

[mozilla3eran]

An absolutely positioned element whose container is an empty relatively
positioned element is not rendered.

Example (full HTML in attachment):
--------------------
     .outer {  position: relative; }
     .inner {  position: absolute; top: 10px; left: 0px;  }
...
  BODY-TEXT
    <SPAN class="outer"> 
       BEGIN-OUTER
       <SPAN class="inner">
         INNER
       </SPAN>
       END-OUTER
    </SPAN>
  BODY-TEXT
--------------------

Above, "INNER" is rendered slightly below "BEGIN-OUTER", which is correct.
However, if you delete the text 'BEGIN-OUTER' and 'END-OUTER' then 'INNER' is
not rendered anywhere.

Tested in Mozilla 0.9.2.

This trick seems useful for adding annotation to text (without disturbing flow).
Is there a more elegant way of doing that?

Comment 1

[mozilla3eran]

Attachment: testcase

Comment 2

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

Confirmed, 2001-08-01-03 on Windows 98 SE.

Comment 3

[karnaze (gone)]

Reassigning to attinasi.

Comment 4

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

yet another block-in-inline problem.  Making the outer element a display:block
element makes things work...

Comment 5

[Hixie (not reading bugmail)]

.

Comment 6

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

This was a dup of bug; it's fixed in current builds.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 79315 ***