The CSS specification do not detail how dotted borders should be drawn. Opera 3.50 draws them as "zebra crossings" when the border width increases. I think that is a better solution than nglayout's current "square dots" policy. Section (5) of the test page lets you test this.

How about actual round dots for dotted borders?

Now that would be cool.

Moving to M11. Not an M10 blocker.

This won't be addressed in the near future, maybee in the next version... or if there is time...

Verified REMIND

Migrating from {css1} to css1 keyword. The {css1}, {css2}, {css3} and {css-moz} radars should now be considered deprecated in favour of keywords. I am *really* sorry about the spam...

This has a target of M11. That was some time ago.

Reopening and moving to future...

Nominating nsbeta2,nsbeta3,rtm. Recc. nsbeta2+, falling through to nsbeta3+ and rtm+ if necessary. This is a W3C CSS1 Official Test Suite compliance bug.

Sorry, to clarify: this is not an nsbeta2 stopper, but I'd permit checking in prior to nsbeta2 if we have a fix. Recc. nsbeta2+[some lenient date-], falling through to nsbeta3+ hard stop if not fixed during nsbeta2. This is a W3C CSS1 Official Test Suite compliance bug.

Eric: This is possibly one of the bugs I would delay the most to fix, and is IMHO not even remotely important for FCS. There is no _bug_ here, we are merely suggested that the dots of 'dotted' borders be drawn as round dots instead of square ones. Are you sure this should be nsbeta3 hardstop?

Putting on [nsbeta2-] radar. Not critical to beta2.

Sorry, and thanks Ian! I totally misunderstood this report; I thought we were *failing* the test. Ian's correct; there's not bug & this goes to future. Clarifying Summary from "dotted borders" to "for dotted borders, want round dots instead of square dots." To simplify tracking & searching (in particular, to avoid wasting the time of people who will be reviewing the [nsbeta2-] bugs for nsbeta3, etc., I'm taking the unusual (but in this case reasonable) step of removing all of the PDT-related markings from both Keywords and Status Whiteboard. (It was only my goof that put them there in the first place.) Removing "nsbeta2,nsbeta3,rtm" from Keywords and "[nsbeta2-]" from Status Whiteboard. Also Ian, should this really have the "css1" keyword? It's not a compliance issue. Your call.

Eric: I'm using the 'css1' keyword for anything CSS1-related, not just for compliance issues. Almost all the bugs marked CSS1 which are currently Future, for example, are not actually compliance issues.

Internet Explorer 5.5 already does this, for the record :-)

I am marking this as invalid for a few reasons. 1.) Currently all our border code goes thru routines that are set up to draw rectangular type dots, so dashes and dotted use the same code as well as all border styles. To change this would be a pretty big job.. not worth the errors that might be introduced. 2.) Using dots could complicate some issues like going around corners. 3.) Looking at examples in books.. the way we implemented dotted and dashed seem consistent with how they handle this issue. 4.) This is so low a priority that even if we did decide to do it.. it would probably never be addressed..

Reopening. INVALID is the wrong resolution, it should be WONTFIX if we actually did decide to close it unfixed. However the competition successfully implements this -- and so it is a valid enhancement request even if it is not a high priority one.

Moving off dcone's plate and onto the helpwanted pile...

Netscape's standard compliance QA team reorganised itself once again, so taking remaining non-tables style bugs. Sorry about the spam. I tried to get this done directly at the database level, but apparently that is "not easy because of the shadow db", "plus it screws up the audit trail", so no can do...

Dotted borders have square dots on Mac, too. Changing to All/All.

Taking (and ->P2), although I may not get to it anytime soon.

Just an FYI: The Oxford American Dictionary says a dot is "a small, *round* point". But, in my opinion, what are the advantages to having round dots for dotted borders anyway? A dotted border is under most, if not all, circumstances, so small that you can't tell if it is a round dot or a rectangular dot anyway.

In most cases, yes, but not all. If you're into CSS semi-hacks, it's possible in IE5/Mac to do this: <span style="border-left: 1em dotted purple;">blah</span> ...and get a single purple circle to the left of the content of the element. For that matter, defining a truly huge single-dot border can give you non-image, completely text-zoom-scaling circles. Granted, it's an edge case, but it's still something Gecko still can't do. And even in less extreme cases, an author might want a 5px wide border with round dots in it instead of smaller dashes. So we really should, at some point, get our dots to be actual dots. I wouldn't call it a top priority or anything but it would certainly be nice.

Every definition I can find for "dot" says dots are round, and I agree - besides, it looks nicer.

Taking for preliminary investigation. biesi suggests looking for this code in nsCSSRendering.cpp.

See also bug 19963, which requires more significant changes to dotted and dashed borders, and is actually somewhat necessary for colors with alpha, which we now support with cairo builds.

Note that one of the interesting questions is what to do at the corners when dotted borders have different widths. I suggest an ellipse, since that allows the two sides of the diagonal to be drawn independently, which does the right thing in the normal case (same width) and does something at least somewhat reasonable in cases where one side is dotted an the other is not. But you might want to test what other browsers do there as well (but consider their solutions in light of how well they work for bug 19963 and how well they work for rgba colors).

This would be a nice nhancement, but I'm not going to get it in the foreseeable future, so I'm going to go ahead and dump it to nobody.

A proposal for the end result of dots and bevels has been attached to bug 19963.

Fixed by thebes rendering rewrite; dots are used for dotted borders > 2px in size.

Maybe it is just me, but personally I would not call this fixed. The circles are cut off at the corners.

Fixing that is bug 379303 -- should be straightforward, just haven't written the code yet.