Playing with floater ideas
- I just tried doing 50% and -1 margins left and right. It worked everywhere except Netscape 4.x. It drew the the lists on top of each other.
- I commented out the -1 margins and then NS4.8 came really close. It put the lists next to each other, but the holder put a border around only the left one.
- Next, I commented out the border around the holder. Now, the two floater boxes are no longer 50-50. The right is squished down to a coupla dozen pixels.
- Oh, and this glitch almost slipped by me. IE6 drew it correctly initially. But switching to another window and back, it lost parts of the border. Just a chunk out of the middle of the two sides, not the entire edge. Very odd.
Darn. So close.
I think the box model is missing one piece.
It's too bad this likely-kinda-common situation wasn't addressed, somehow. I can see those borders causing constant headaches. The problem is, it's one of those 50-50 situations. Sometimes you'd want to specify the outer extents of the box, including border and margins. Other times, you'd want to specify the internal dimensions of the box, and the margin and borders just fall where they may.
If it were me, I would have provided a method to tell the renderer what to include within the box extents. I can see situations where I would want to define the edge of the box to include the padding, the border, or the margins.