[css3-lists] list-style-position behavior

There are two distinct behaviors for list-style-position:outside
between browsers.  One group (IE8, FF, Opera) positions the marker
relative to the first line box in the list item.  This means that it
cares about text-align, and will "follow" the text.  Another group
(IE9, Webkit) positions the marker relative to the list item itself,
so text-align is ignored.

Since IE changed behavior, I suppose that means there's not a
significant compat impact.  Is this true?

Right now my plan is to spec the first (line-box-based) behavior as
"list-style-position:hanging", and the second (list-item-based)
behavior as "list-style-position:outside".


One additional wrinkle.  As part of the bidi-in-HTML workshop, it was
brought up that directionality played badly with list markers.  In
particular, if your list items are mixed ltr and rtl, the marker will
show up on both sides.  You have to put padding on both sides of the
list container so that the marker is always visible, which is ugly.
As such, I'm speccing 'outside' to pay attention to the list
container's direction rather than the list-item's direction.  I don't
think this will cause problems (there's no difference in the common
case, and may even make things better in existing mixed-direction
situations), but just wanted a quick sanity check on this.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 4 February 2011 21:49:01 UTC