Okay, so I am in the process of designing a website which has a login form at the top-right corner of a webpage. I set the size attribute of its input fields and I am getting some interesting results. Below is a group of screenshots that I threw together. I even stacked them for you all. I am even throwing in a jsFiddle for you all. So four things:
I aligned them based on the bottom right hand corner of the password input field in the stacked image. Don't ask why.
I design with borders on everything until the layout is correct, then I remove them and add the colors and images and whatnot.
The IE 9 screenshot is based on Adobe's BrowserLab since I am working on a Mac.
Note that the WebKit-based browsers (Safari and Chrome) render the same size.
I could not find anything to reveal what is happening after a series of searches. Maybe it's because it's hard to word a question like this into simple search terms (or at least for me)…
With all of this said, my question is why is are the input fields rendered so differently, and most importantly, how can I remedy this (without JavaScript or the dependence on User Agents preferably)?
The size attribute sets the number of characters that the field will display (in the case of text and password fields). Different browsers use different default fonts, font sizes, and ppi measures, meaning that you get massively different sized (in pixels) fields.
Also, as the spec says, this is merely the "initial" width of the control, and the browser is free to resize the control if it decides it needs to in the course of reflowing the entire page.
To even have a hope of making this field close to the same (pixel) size on different browsers, you'll have to style it with CSS. That being said, there is probably a good reason that each of these are different sizes - mostly having to do with default fonts - and if you pixel-restrict the size of the field that means some browsers will display more actual text than others.
Related
I have a web app with a form in it. The form in turn has a select element with options containing a bunch of users' info, their names being set as the label/content of the option elements.
Now apparently one of the users' parents think it's fun to give their child a name with 3000 characters of gibberish in it.
I wouldn't want to make his life any harder than it is, but unfortunately I'll have to remove his account because the long name seems to introduce some interesting limitations on browsers that I didn't know about.
I started highly scientific testing using this fiddle with a few browsers in two computers and found out that
Chrome v50 (64bit) displayed a black box instead of the dropdown when the label length hit 1510
FF v46 refused to open the dropdown at all when the content length was 2716
IE v11 doesn't even break a sweat with tens of thousands of characters
Chrome v49 was the least fun of all. It rendered the whole window and all the other open tabs fully black so I had to close them all and start again. Didn't bother to find the exact limit for that
It seems though that the actual limits are much more related to the content width and not the length, as changing the character from "a" to "i" using proportional font affected the results.
The question: is there a reason Chrome and FF flip out with content of this size? Is there a specific limit on how long/wide the option's label can be (other than the subjective opinions about aesthetic/usable form inputs)?
Just like I have mentioned in the title.
How do you guys manage the fonts , when you do a web design
because different browsers even you set equal in pixel but the result seems to be different.
It makes other element collapse with the things I have designed.
so please advice me.
Eg: most browsers are okay , but IE is bad.The fonts appear to be very big than in others.
For main body text, you don't. Some people want bigger text so they can read it more easily; get in their way at your peril. Use relative font sizes in units such as ‘em’ or ‘%’.
For small amounts of presentational text where you need text size to match pixel-sized on-screen elements, use the ‘px’ unit. Don't use ‘pt’ - that only makes sense for printing, it'll resize more-or-less randomly when viewed on-screen.
You can still never get the text exactly the same size because fonts differ across platforms—and Lucida Grande and Helvetica look very different of course.
Is it possible to print a HTML page with truly absolute positioned elements to paper? It seems all browsers are doing a big mess here. It is easy to define a body by absolute units (eg. cm) and place elements by position: absolute inside. However, every browser seem to try to make it impossible to print such a page. FF for example is adding print margins, even when printing to a PDF on linux despite 0-margin page settings. Chrome seems to shrink the page in every case.
So how to print something with absolute positioning, eg. paper form fields, markings etc.?
Have I overlooked something?
Sadly, the CSS3 Module: Paged Media allows all this to happen. This are the rules concerning pages which are too big:
3.3.3. Rendering page boxes that do not fit a page sheet
If a page box does not match the target page sheet dimensions, the user agent MAY choose (in order of preference) to:
Render the page box at the indicated size on a larger page sheet.
Rotate the page box 90° if this will make the page box fit the page sheet.
Scale the page box to fit the page sheet. (There is no requirement to maintain the aspect ratio of the page or of any elements on the page when scaling; however, preservation of the aspect ratio is preferred.) [done by Chrome]
Reformat the page contents, including 'spilling' onto other page sheets. [done by many other or older browsers]
Clip overflowed content (least preferred).
The user agent should consult the user before performing these operations.
3.3.4. Positioning the page box on the sheet
When the page box is smaller than the page size, the user agent should center the page box on the sheet since this will align double-sided pages and avoid accidental loss of information that is printed near the edge of the sheet.
And this is the rule which breaks all your positioned stuff:
3.7. Content outside the page box
[...] Also, when boxes are positioned absolutely, they MAY end up
in "inconvenient" locations. For example, images MAY be placed on the
edge of the page box. Similarly when boxes use fixed or relative
positioning, they MAY also end up outside of the page box.
A specification for the exact formatting of such elements lies outside
the scope of this document. However, we recommend that authors and
user agents observe the following general principles concerning
content outside the page box:
User agents SHOULD avoid generating a large number of empty page boxes to honor the positioning of elements (e.g., you don't want to
print 100 blank pages). Note, however, that generating a small number
of empty page boxes MAY be necessary to honor the 'left' and 'right'
values for 'page-break-before' and 'page-break-after'.
Authors SHOULD not position elements in inconvenient locations just to avoid rendering them. Instead:
To suppress box generation entirely, set the 'display' property to 'none'.
To make a box invisible, set the 'visibility' property.
User agents MAY handle boxes positioned outside the page box in several ways, including discarding them or creating page boxes for
them at the end of the document.
Have a look at the second paragraph of section 3.7: A specification for the exact formatting of such elements lies outside the scope of this document. Since there is no other document and no other guideline then the general principle following this paragraph, every browser can do whatever it want.
It's one of the flaws that are currently in this CSS3 module. However, I think those flaws cannot be removed by a CSS4 or revised CSS3 module, as the variety of possible stylesheets and resulting layouts is too huge too cover. Also note a little footnote given in CSS Print Profile:
‡ The printer MAY ignore positioned elements that are placed on the page before the position of the current element in the normal flow.
So it's basically not possible to create the same effect in every browser. As for the time being, the only possible way to achieve a portable document is to create a PDF with a third-party application or via a PDF printer and your most favorite browser. Every other way is bound to fail as long as either the W3C's recommendations aren't strict or the browser vendors implement whatever they want.
See also:
CSS3 Module: Paged Media (Working draft, last revision 2006)
CSS Print Profile (Working draft, last revision 2006)
Additional notes
If you have a bunch of position:absolute elements which need to be printed it's sometimes a good question whether an element actually needs to be positioned absolute, or if the same effect can be achieved in a slightly different or easier way. Also note that you should use display:none on each element that isn't truly needed for the printed media, such as ads, navigations, etc...
As you say, web browsers tend to do crazy things when printing. Print-oriented engines are often better.
WeasyPrint is an open-source engine that renders to PDF and supports absolute positioning as well as CSS 3 Paged Media to set the page margins:
#page { margin: 1cm /* or 0, if you want */ }
Make your container to have relative position. That's the only way to keep absolute positioned elements in the same place at every screen and paper. so if your main div (the div where all of your content is located) add following to your css:
#maindivname{position:relative;}
Should do the trick.
I have tested browser status for printing "position:absolute" elements with the following results:
IE 11: Fail. Doesn't matter what OS, 7,8,8.1.
IE 10: Pass. However, you cannot revert to 10 on 8.1 so folks with that are stuck.
Firefox up to 38.05 = Fail. Unknown if any version ever worked.
The good news is that it looks like the Blink/WebKit people did their homework instead of using poor code.
Chrome: Pass
Opera: Pass
Media Queries will do the trick -- check this link and previous question out, maybe it will help.
Suggestions for debugging print stylesheets?
Media Query transitioning px into inches/cm/whatever needed for printing requirements.
That border/margin you mentioned is probably your printer's printable area (the grip edge). Most printers need some type of edge to grab and feed the stock. That's why when one prints a full-bleed document (ink to the very edge), it's printed on stock larger than needed, then trimmed down.
set the margin with page setup is the first and primary solutions for printing the HTML page or a DIV .
After all not expected result will come then you need some digs on your HTML page.
Make a window without title bar or any custom bar using java script.And put all Original data into that window with a position:relative and also set the media type as print.
position:relative;
media:print;
Hope it will helpful.
Use in CSS this property:
body{
-webkit-print-color-adjust:exact;
}
This help positions absolutes and backgrounds in tables.
Right now, we are trying to achieve consistent formatting of textarea elements, across Safari/Chrome/Firefox/IE on Mac and Windows. I believe this may be a rabbit hole, since any combination thereof could produce formatting in a slightly different way -- maybe one combination adds a bit of padding to a div here differently than the others, another one breaks multi-line text there differently than the others, and so on.
Instead of using textarea (or div) elements, can we achieve pixel-perfect positioning using HTML5's canvas? Or using the Raphael JavaScript library? Or maybe some other JS library?
Mainly, by pixel-perfect, what I mean is any arbitrary text should get rendered in the exact same way (especially with respect to line breaks and padding) in any of the above-mentioned browsers.
(I'd prefer to avoid Flash-based solutions for the moment, unless that is the only solution...)
Send the text to the server, have the server render an image, display the image. Voilà.
I would say this is nearly impossible.
I would also say that there is no reason to have pixel perfect across all browsers because the overwhelming majority of visitors only view your site with one browser. And those who do visit your site in more than one browser (say at work and at home) are unlikely to notice elements that are off a few pixels or have slightly different border colors.
What we should be concerned about is that the content looks good in each browser.
That said, here's a great list of textarea tricks: http://css-tricks.com/6841-textarea-tricks/
One main reason that PDF exists is that browsers are not about pixel-identical layout but PDF is. Among other things, not even typefaces are guaranteed to be the same from one OS/browser to the next.
Even, if you don't let the browser position anything and you do all your own pixel level positioning, you still won't necessarily have the same fonts to work with. If you let the browser position anything, then you can have variations.
Would one solution be to begin your css with a clean slate? Give everything a known default?
For example, I start my css files like this so I always know what to expect:
*{
margin:0;
padding:0;
}
Is that what you're looking for? Similarly, you could change '*' to 'textarea'.
I'm not sure if it is possible, however one thing you may want to look into is using the web developer toolbar for firefox or the web developer add-on for chrome. There is an option to disable browser default styles. Check this and then style everything. The borders, border type, all margins, paddings, background colors, etc. Then reenable browser default styles and make sure it looks the same. If not, wash, rinse and repeat.
Also, if fonts play a part, you will have to embed them into the page since some operating systems may not have a particular font installed.
I have been given an existing table layout (for tabular data) with the task of making it as accessible as possible.
I added a caption tag to each table within the layout and I realized the caption width is not consistent across different browsers. After a bit of trial and error with CSS, I managed to get it right on all the browsers I need to support aside from Firefox (very last release) where the tables are larger than their own captions (with same width declared in the CSS)
I have googled a bit and this seems to be a known issue.
Any standard solution/suggestion for this?
Thanks in advance
Mirko
Keep in mind that captions don't HAVE to be visible and they still will be accesible, for instance if you hide them (display:none OR visibility:hidden), the width won't matter, as they won't be "seen" in the page, however a screen reader will still pick them up.