Consider a dropdown menu using SELECT and OPTION in a FORM. If a style is associated with such an OPTION, the style is shown in the dropdown menu. However, if an OPTION is selected, the associated style is not retained when releasing the mouse. Forthcoming attachment will illustrate this. Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

This is a dropdown menu with three OPTION items, using the style attributes bold, italic and small-caps respectively.

This is a dropdown menu with three OPTION items, using the style attributes bold, italic and small-caps respectively.

to form controls. The style shown when the dropdown is collapsed is the style of the _select_, and I see no reason it should be otherwise...

The obvious reason is that each option can have its own style, wheras select only can have one. Consider an option with lang="zh" and another option with lang="en", and it becomes somewhat more obvious. New test case: put Hebrew text in one option and English in another. What bidi algorithm will be applied to the _collapsed_ select element? This is reversed inheritance, and it really must be so. Or do you really reverse the Hebrew text, applying ltr? Another testcase: Suppose I have a list with mainly English elements and one (or more) with Chinese text? The Chinese text should be rendered with a bigger point size, due to its complicated nature, and I would also like it to be rendered with the font Cyberbit. The English elements would be rendered using Lucida Grande or another Western font. What happens in the collapsed select? Try http://homepage.mac.com/nikd/dvd/alien/ for a real world example. There's a Chinese title at the bottom of the dropdown. In the future, I expect things to get even worse... all those Bollywood productions, all the Russian classics, some Iranian master pieces in Farsi... A workaround would be using optgroups with style, but the damn thing doesn't work well with Mozilla. I think this is a style issue.

Note: XML testcase isn't well-formed. So the point here is that the styles aren't displayed on the closed menu?

Comment on attachment 96966 [details] Test case Yes, that is the point. (I mistakenly sent plain/text and thought I stopped it in time; it is text/html as in the second attachment.)

Chinese is here rendered illegible and unantialiased when collapsing. It doesn't look very pretty. From the HTML spec: "The SELECT element creates a menu. Each choice offered by the menu is represented by an OPTION element. A SELECT element must contain at least one OPTION element." The SELECT element is thus just the containing box (that could be styled with borders and such), and if one or more OPTION elements are visible, collapsed or not, they should retain the style at all times. This becomes more obvious if the SELECT element has the attribute "multiple" attached to it, because then we have a list box with several OPTION elements visible at all time. The drop-down menu is just a special compact case where only one OPTION is visible in the collapsed state. That particular OPTION should thus retain its style.

Here, the style for each OPTION is retained at all times. Yet, the only difference is in the size attribute of the SELECT element. Inconsistent.

I intend to rewrite the select display anyway. This bug came at an opportune time. And it is definitely valid.

yeah, but..... *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 79107 ***