93980 - <DD> indents text outside of <DL> on Win NT but not other OSs

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 5119

(Core :: Layout, defect)

Description

[Lisa Emerson]

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.2) Gecko/20010704
BuildID:    2001070414

This seems to work in all versions of NS and IE I've used, but the <dd> ident
tag doesn't seem to work for me in Mozilla (I am using v0.9.2).  When used, it
seems to just ignore it.  Is the <dd> attribute supported in Mozilla, or is it a
problem on my end?  Thank you.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a page.  In it, type:  <dd>blah
2. When viewed, it should have indented the "blah" as a new paragraph.
3. It does so in other browsers, but not in Mozilla, at least for me.

Actual Results:  It ignores the <dd> attribute.

Expected Results:  It should indent.

Each paragraph on the page of the URL I provided should be indented, but it is
not when I view the page with Mozilla.  =P  I apologize if this has been
mentioned before, or if it seems trivial, but I didn't see any information on
your site about it, and I'm finding viewing my pages without indentions where I
put them somewhat annoying and frankly occasionally hard to read.

Comment 1

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

Attachment: Testcase for definition list

Comment 2

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

I've created a testcase, as the reported URL doesn't seem to contain any <dd>
elements.  Reporter: at the risk of sounding didactic, I'm going to point out
that "dd" is not a generic indenting tag, it's used to indicate an element in a
definition list.  (Look up the HTML spec at <URL:http://www.w3.org/> for
details).  If you're interested in a discussion of what HTML is and isn't (or
perhaps "should and shouldn't be") with regard to things like this, you might
want to look at <URL:http://css.nu/markup/markup-tagsoup.html>.  The discussion
is rather technical, but if you take the time to wade through it, you may find
yourself enlightened as to why <dd> is not just "a tag used to indent things".  

For what it's worth, a better solution to make things indented is probably to
precede the text you want indented by "&nbsp;" a few times (creates a hard
space), or even dispense with indenting entirely-most web pages I see just use
an extra line break to separate paragraphs.  (There's also CSS2 "text-indent",
but that's probably not well-supported at this point-you're better off using
"&nbsp;".)

This concludes my sanctimonious little lecture on web design.  Oh, and the
testcase WFM, nightly build 2001080603, Win NT.

Comment 3

[Mike Young]

Damn Mid-Air Collisions! This is what I was going to write before I got beaten
to it.
--------------------------------------


The <dd> tag is a Definition List tag. It is not intended as an indent tag.
(Although on older browsers it did have this effect.) Specifically it is the
Definition part of a Definition list. 

<DL>
<DT>Term <DD> Definition
<DL>

Is the proper use of the DD tag.
Used in this context, the DD tag does work (and does indent.)

As far as I know, the use of the DD tag outside of the DL tag is invalid. To
indent text, You should use the <P> tag and Style Sheets to specify the
text-indent attribute. 

Indenting text in HTML has been a problem from its very inception. The accepted
solution is using CSS Style sheets, but many web sites use 1px transparent gifs
as "spacers" to move the text where they want.

I would assume that this bug report is "invalid", but I don't know whether it is
requesting that DD tags work outside of DL tags. If that is the case, then we
need someone to tell us whether the HTML spec says that DD are invalid outside
of DLs (It looks that way to me, but the HTML spec is a very confusing thing. :-)

Comment 4

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

Attachment: Very invalid testcase

Comment 5

[Christopher Hoess (gone)]

Ok, I've just attached a testcase sticking <dd> (without <dl>) in both a
paragraph and a table cell, and it seems to be working fine.  I'm going to close
this as INVALID.  Reporter, if you can provide a web page where you're seeing
this not working and a build #, reopen this bug.

Comment 6

[Mike Young]

reopening per conversation on IRC. Apparently the DD outside of a DL works on NT
but not on Win98. Very weird.

Comment 7

[RC]

WinXP / IE6 indents the second testcase properly.
WinXP / Opera 5.12 indents the second testcase properly, though the line spacing
is off.
WinXP / Lynx 2.83rel1 indents the first testcase, but not the second.WinXP / Moz
2001080603 fails to indent the second test case -at all-.

Comment 8

[Mike Young]

Confirming this bug. and changing summary. the fact that the indenting works on
NT but not other OSs is definately an issue.

Comment 9

[Mike Young]

Moz on Win98 and XP and probably everywhere do render the second attachment with
indented text if you change the DOCTYPE to Strict instead of Transitional. 

The last line in that testcase is indented because it gets caught in the last DD
tag. (Even though it says unindented)

Comment 10

[Mats Palmgren (inactive)]

This is in fact a regression of bug 5119.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 5119 ***

Comment 11

[Mike Young]

good catch mats! Verifying as dup. Apparently it is a bug in quirk.css line 320. 

Comment 12

[Heikki Toivonen (remove -bugzilla when emailing directly)]

SPAM. HTML Element component deprecated, changing component to Layout. See bug
88132 for details.