Rustam Abdullaev

Rusty,

> It drops the float when there is an overflow. I made a simple page to show
> it:

Nice catch.

What's happening is that the element following the float has overflow, so it
creates a new block formatting context - this means it should appear to the
right of the float, and not be overlapped by it as normal. If the parent is
400px wide, and the float is 200px wide, this means the following element
should be 200px wide. According to the CSS spec, the width of the scrollbar
should be _subtracted_ from the width, so it should be 184px wide, with a
(typically) 16px scrollbar. Instead, IE 8 beta 2 adds the width of the
scrollbar to the width of the element, making it 200px with a 16px
scrollbar. This means its total width is now 216px, and there is no longer
enough space for it to fit beside the float (which is still floating), and
instead it is pushed below it.

I have made a simplified testcase here:
http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/ieBugs/scrollbarwidth.html

Admittedly, they have done quite well with beta 2. Only 4 of the regressions
I had previously listed still exist. However, there is a new one with double
colons in CSS that completely breaks my entire site. Hope they fix that
before final, or people are going to be relying on it for CSS hacks...


Mark 'Tarquin' Wilton-Jones - author of http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/