[thelist] Gecko form display and doctypes

Bird, Graham Graham.Bird at rspb.org.uk
Wed Dec 18 05:18:01 CST 2002


Hi,

I've come up against a set of problems in Netscape 6 & 7 that look like
bugs. Can anyone confirm whether this is actually proper behaviour? It is to
do with forms (on documents with the XHTML 1.0 Transitional Doctype) such
as:

<form>
<fieldset>
<legend>My form</legend>
<label>Title<input type="text" /></label>
</fieldset>
</form>

with the following css:

label {
display: block;
}

input  {
display: block;
}

If you remove the doctype all is well, and if you upgrade it to XHTML 1.0
Strict it's also OK. With the Transitional doctype though, Netscape 6.2
won't render anything inside label tags and Netscape 7 won't render form
elements that have display: block applied to them. Netscape 6.0 and Mozilla
1.1 render correctly.

This has some implications for accessible form design, especially the
Netscape 7 issue - but of course only if you use the Transitional doctype.
Should Transitional behave this way, or is Netscape getting it's wires
crossed, or have I missed something really obvious?

Many thanks for any thoughts,

Graham Bird




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