Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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WebKit quirk 1¶

With all the Acid mania Apple's WebKit folks are digging into I sometimes can't help thinking that this perhaps comes at the cost of ignoring less spectacular but more practically relevant issues.

Of course all these comments are utterly irrelevant as I don't know the spec by heart and I have no idea how to get meaningful results out of their bug reporter without having to read loads of stuff I'm not interested in. My judgement only comes from situations where (a) WebKit's behaviour seems unreasonable and possibly (b) other browsers' behaviour seems more reasonable.

A – IMO – glaringly obvious problem of this class is that WebKit simply kills the padding of inline items at line breaks. This has made multi-line menus look broken in WebKit for years if I'm not mistaken. Make your browser window narrow enough to get a line break below and judge yourself whether Safari or Firefox give a more desirable result rendering it:

Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra Abracadabra

There are 20px of horizontal padding on each box. To illustrate the problem further and to make sure Firefox (2) doesn't come out too well, I'll add this – which fails more for the direction:rtl usage than the Arabic in Firefox and highlights that WebKit 'loses' its padding at the end of the line rather than at the right.

الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية الصفحة الرئيسية

Look at this as a separate file. Or look at another instance of this problem.

April 17, 2008, 9:39

Tagged as web design.

Comments

Comment by Wes: ¶

Hi, you’d be well advised to post a bug at bugs.webkit.org. Its not that difficult and even if its turns out to not be a bug or is a duplicate of an existing one I’m sure the WebKit guys would prefer to hear about it. Especially since you have a test case. I’m subscribed to the webkkit-dev email list and the first thing they suggest when anyone gets on with a ‘I don’t know if this is bug but…’ or a feature request type question, they just say file a bug and they will look into it.

April 18, 2008, 8:03

Comment by Oliver: ¶

Wes is right, the best way to file a bug on WebKit is to use http://bugs.webkit.org — this has the added advantage of allowing you to track progress on the bug :D

April 18, 2008, 21:19