ne**@celticbear.com wrote:
I've a site: http://gto.ie-studios.net/products.php that looks
perfectly fine in Windows whether with IE or Firefox 1.0.
But when viewed in the Linux version of Firefox 1.0, images get
misaligned and breaks between then appear.
Why the two different behaviors on the same browser but different
OS's?
The two different behaviors are because the text input (under "Search")
has different widths. The width of text inputs that have 'auto' width
is determined from:
1. the number of characters the text input is supposed to contain,
which comes from the size attribute (28 in this case) or its
default value and
2. the font's metrics for average and maximum character width.
The formula is different depending on whether the font is monospace or
proportional.
So, based on what fonts are available, it seems like the character
widths of the fonts chosen when you specify 'font-family:
Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 10px' differ between
platforms. The design is based around the assumption that those
character widths will be the same across platforms. This is not a safe
assumption, since different platforms tend to have different fonts
available and their font systems may even treat the same fonts slightly
differently.
Probably the best solution to this problem is to specify the width of
the input using CSS (e.g., 'width: 100%') rather than using the size
attribute, since there doesn't seem to be any special reason that the
text input needs to hold exactly 28 characters, but there does seem to
be a design preference that it fill a certain space.
-David
--
L. David Baron <URL:
http://dbaron.org/ >