[whatwg] borders on images inside links

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Mar 2, 2010, at 2:41 AM, Markus Ernst wrote:

> Ashley Sheridan schrieb:
>> On Tue, 2010-03-02 at 01:56 -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>> On Mar 2, 2010, at 1:41 AM, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>>>
>>> > 2) I do not believe the proposed rule is a good default for  
>>> either  > documents or applications. It looks ugly. I randomly  
>>> checked 10 of  > the sites I browse most often and I could not  
>>> find a single one that  > explicitly added this rule for the  
>>> browsers that don't have it.  > What's more, I could not find a  
>>> single one that retained it for  > images. This rule is just a  
>>> vestigial artifact that Web developers  > have to work around.
>>>
>>> I partially take it back, news.google.com and images.google.com   
>>> deliberately add blue borders to image links. However they do not  
>>> use  a default border (it's 1px instead of 2px for one thing).
>>>
>>>  - Maciej
>>>
>> I agree with David Baron on this. The majority of browsers render  
>> images within links as having a border (which is the image  
>> highlight equivalent of a text underline when you think about it in  
>> context). Having some default expected behavior would be nice to  
>> see in a spec, even if the majority of websites actually override  
>> it. Having it in a spec will remain consistent with the older  
>> browser implementations, and may serve as a guideline as to exactly  
>> what should be expected.
>> Besides, like you say Maciej, most website devs override this rule  
>> anyway, so it won't actually break anything, it would just clarify  
>> what is already happening.
>
> I assume that it would be desirable for a specified default to  
> reflect the most common case, unless there are serious BC issues.  
> The most common case seems to be images without borders.

I don't think there are serious compatibility issues. We've been  
shipping this behavior in Safari since 2003. I searched all our bugs  
mentioning images or borders (including closed bugs) and could not  
find one mentioning this issue. Probably no one noticed because the  
vast majority of Websites had already been overriding this behavior  
for years.

> I apologize for the case this is a stupid suggestion: Could the spec  
> say that the default for HTML5 is no border, but UAs are encouraged  
> to render linked images in documents with pre-HTML5 or no doctypes  
> with a border?


I don't think there is any evidence that this behavior is necessary or  
desirable for pre-HTML5 documents.

Regards,
Maciej