Consider this simple HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 STRICT//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head>
<title>Strict kills my widths!</title>
</head>
<body>
<table style="width:400px; table-layout:fixed;">
<colgroup>
<col style="width:50%;"/ >
<col style="width:50%;"/ >
</colgroup>
<tr>
<td>
<input type="text" style="width:100%;" />
</td>
<td>
<input type="text" style="width:100%;" />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
Both text boxes have their right edges clipped off. Sure, the "Proper"
box model says that width is the width of the content, excluding the
padding and border (and margin, of course.) Wonderful. So now, with
all standard text boxes (and many other controls) having things like
padding and borders, what good is a percentage width?
I could (and do, for lack of a better workaround) use a slightly
smaller width, like 98%, but that has to be adjusted depending on the
width of the table and how many columns it has - smaller tables require
even more reduction in percentage width for the text boxes to fit.
I know the geniuses in the W3C think that their box model is the best,
but if you draw a box (essentially a border) and then write some text
in the middle of it with some space between the edge of the box and the
text, then ask any kid to measure the width of the box, he'll measure
from border to border, INCLUDING padding!
I know, I should stop whining and just stop using STRICT, right? Well,
I could, but that's a step backwards and there are other parts of the
strict doctype that are very appealing.
There's got to be a viable solution to this. Sure, 100% minus padding
minus border is the real answer, but since that's not possible (without
using dynamic properties) to put specify such a formula as width, how
can I solve this issue?
I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS!
