Remove left and right borders for tr.merge-down td and tr.merge-down th

the absence of a border on 1 row in a table where all other rows have such a border causes browsers to enlarge this row to make the entirety the same size, see screenshot

attached patch fixes this

BTW in chrome the sticking out part was on the left, and in firefox on the right :)

I started with the original patch, then used the :first-child and :last-child selectors to restore the left and right borders to the first and last elements (td or th) in the row. These selectors will not work in IE (until IE9 comes out: see http://www.quirksmode.org/css/contents.html ). Heck, it is only one pixel!

I assume we want the same effect on th as on td.

What about top and bottom margins? We could count on never having two merge-down rows next to each other, but I decided to be cautious. Instead of removing the entire border from the td's, I just removed the left and right borders.

The results look good to me. See the attached screen shot: I used the browser (Chrome on a Mac) to change the background colors to make it easier to see the white borders (or lack thereof).

P.S. I should be more specific. When I say it will not work in IE, I mean it will work no better than the original patch. It may even work in IE7 and IE8: I have not tested. The "one pixel" I mentioned is the same one pointed out in Comment #2.

I have a better idea. I like it enough that I am bumping the status to "needs review."

I remove the left and right borders from tr.merge-down td and tr.merge-down th as in my previous patch. Then, I add the border back on three sides of tr.merge-down. See the results in the attached screen shot. In order to make it easier to see, I also attached a screen shot where I have made all the borders red instead of white.

The screen shots were made using Chrome 8 on a Mac. It looks the same with Firefox 3.6 and Safari 5.

A little tweak. It should make no difference unless someone wants to override the theme, but since I do not change the top and bottom borders of the td and th elements, it makes sense not to change the top border of the tr.merge-down. No new screen shots, since they look exactly the same.

my patch #1001932: Clean up Status report CSS (and IE fix) fixed for IE (all themes). it may affect this patch.

@droplet,
Thanks for the warning. Your patch only affects top and bottom borders, and mine only affects left and right borders, so there should not be any interference. Just to be sure, I applied your patch to a clean copy of Drupal, took a screen shot, applied my patch, and took another screen shot. Have a look.

I think I will change the issue title to emphasize this point.

IE6 prevents us from implementing a better solution.

One little problem with removing the (left and right) borders as in the patch (comment #8) is that it applies to all td and th elements inside a tr.merge-down, even if they are part of a nested table. For example,

<table class="system-status-report">
  <tr class="merge-down">
    <td>icon goes here</td>
    <td>
      <table><tr>
        <td>Where is my border?</td>
        <td>And mine?</td>
      </tr></table>
    </td>
    <td>status message</td>
  </tr>
  <tr class="merge-up">
    <td colspan="3">Longer message goes here.</td>
  </tr>
</table>

Clearly, we only want to play with the td and th elements that are direct descendants of the tr.merge-down, so we should use

tr.merge-down > td, tr.merge-down > th {
  border-left: none;
  border-right: none;
}

Unfortunately, IE6 does not recognize the > selector, so we cannot do that.

If anyone thinks we should inflict a barely perceptible 1px white border inside tr.merge-down on people still using IE6 in exchange for making life easier for future coders who want to nest a table inside the system status report, I will be happy to re-roll the patch.

@Jeff Burnz,
Here is the patch using child selectors. I have also made new screen shots (using Chrome 8 on a Mac). See my previous comments for screen shots without any patches. These shots show the effect of my latest patch (looks the same as the one on comment #7). As before, I made one screen shot where I colored the borders red to make them stand out more.

It would be nice to have one of the patches (#8 or #13) committed and have this issue closed. See #11 for a discussion of the differences between the two patches.

D8 core no longer cares for anything below IE8.

#13: 987982_13.patch queued for re-testing.

If we are bumping the version to 8.x, we will have to re-roll the patch and re-test. I do not have time for it now.

Need I add that it is frustrating to submit a patch and have it sit for more than 17 months, only to have it made obsolete?

If we no longer care about IE6, then let's work with the patch from #13 above.

There is no more tr.merge-down in the D8 version of Bartik, so nothing to fix. I am reverting the version to 7.x-dev.

If it is not worth fixing, then someone else can change the status to "closed, won't fix." If it is worth fixing, please use the patch in #8 if you want to cater to IE6 and otherwise use the patch in #13.

Closing as won't fix.

Since my name seems to have been attached to the summary, I thought I might as well update it.