Re: [CSSOM] offsetWidth, offsetLeft issues

On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 1:10 PM, Ojan Vafai <ojan@chromium.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 1:17 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 8:50 AM, Erik Arvidsson <arv@chromium.org> wrote:
>>
>>> The width and height of getBoundingClientRect is always the same as
>>
>>  offsetWidth and offsetHeight.
>>>
>>
>> I don't really care about this one. offsetWidth and offsetHeight are
>> really bad legacy features.
>>
>
> No argument there. But we should at least make them as sane as possible,
> no? In the case of tables with captions, it makes more sense to include the
> caption. Given that IE already does this, it seems likely to maximize
> compatibility, or at least not make it worse.
>

It seems to me that right now the CSSOM spec is a little vague on this
matter. On the offset* properties it talks about "the border-edge of element
A", when it really needs to specify a particular CSS box (or union of CSS
boxes).

I don't really mind if the spec changes so that offsetWidth and offsetHeight
match the size of getBoundingClientRect. That would make them include the
table caption. However, I can't promise that we'll change Gecko to match. It
seems almost any change to our offset* implementation produces regressions
in Web content, perhaps because there is browser-sniffing code that makes
assumptions about what we currently do. I'd rather just give up on offset*
and forget about them and concentrate on making
getClientRects/getBoundingClientRect useful and interoperable across
browsers.

Rob
-- 
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