Technical post, sorry.
It’s my day for tooth-grinding annoyance on the development side of things. First of all, there’s Apache Cocoon, a Java/XML/XSLT framework I am using for a project at work. This is about the worst tool I’ve ever seen for web development. The only worse one I can think of is Miva Merchant’s proprietary scripting language. It’s far too technical to go into here, but Apache Cocoon is a good idea the way Communism is a good idea — in other words, on paper and in an idealized world where everything works *completely differently* than it does in actual life. I spent the first part of my work day today trying to get Apache Cocoon to print a number without changing it first.
Now, I’m trying to style a fieldset legend. The fieldset is a useful but uncommon means of grouping form elements together under a similar heading. It’s a great semantic way of dealing with complex form information. But the default appearance is uglier than Don Rumsfeld, like most things in HTML. (”Here’s an example”:http://www.thudfactor.com/examples/fieldset.html.)
Now, clearly there are a lot of so-called “design” decisions in this default behavior:
* there’s a grooved border
* the legend is offset from the left margin
* the legend intersects the fieldset border.
Much of this you can change with CSS. But what you cannot change with CSS in FireFox — at least, not without a hack that makes its behavior questionable in other browsers — is the indentation from the left margin. I hate that indentation; under certain circumstances, it makes your page look like it has a ragged left edge.
I’ve seen a number of strategies for fixing this, but the two least hackish[1] no longer work in current versions of FireFox; they’ve been _intentionally_ disabled. So I can either not use it (and thus weaken semantic markup for this page) or I can find another way to hack it that will undoubtedly force me to write additional hacks for Opera, IE, and possibly Mac browsers. Whee.
fn1. Floating the element, or positioning the element absolutely.
