On 10/22/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
Okay, here's the situation. If the editsection span is placed after the heading proper in source, IE and Firefox don't want to reflow and so they move the float down below any already-rendered content. Opera, and apparently Safari, handle this correctly. I tried fiddling with CSS hacks to get it to display right, but gave up. Currently I'm thinking I'll revert to an in-source layout more like the previous one, with the editsection span placed before the entire h# element, and perhaps the h# element set to display as inline if that looks helpful. Any thoughts?
The best I could come up with was to move everything back to the old layout, but wrap headings in a div and change h#'s to display inline, then shift all padding/border/margin rules to affect the wrapper div rather than the h#. That makes the section edit link look good in Monobook, but for some reason it does basically nothing for other layouts.
Frankly, the only real way I can see to solve this properly is to use a table. That would solve this perfectly (the position of table cell contents can be much more simply coordinates than floats plus nonfloats), and would have the added benefit of solving http://bugs.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1629 (which can't be solved at all using CSS). It would also allow the French and German Wikipedias to implement their changes using CSS only, not JS.
Tables shouldn't be used unless necessary, but I've come to conclude that they're so much simpler and more effective here that this is a case where their use is justified. I certainly won't switch things over to tables unless I get the okay for it, but anyway, comments appreciated. I've been working on this for the past five hours and will be taking a little break now (good thing this got to me on a Sunday).