Ajaxian

Monday, December 24th, 2007

Infamous IE hasLayout is toast

Category: IE, CSS

We are slowly finding more and more out about how nice IE8 is going to play. Markus Mielke
came out to tell us that hasLayout is a goner:

I do not think I am disclosing too much by saying that HasLayout will be history with IE8 (it was an internal data-structure to begin with and should have never been exposed). See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb250481.aspx for more details.

So what does “having a Layout” mean?

• In short, having a layout means that an element is responsible for sizing and
  positioning itself and possibly any child elements. (If a child element has its
  own layout, it sizes itself and its descendents, but the original layout
  positions the child.)
• Some elements have a “fixed” size or otherwise have special sizing constraints.
  They always have layout—for example, buttons, images, inputs, selects, and
  marquee elements have always a native size even if width and height are not
  specified.
• Sometimes elements that do not normally require layout information, like a div
  or a span, may have properties specified that force a layout to be
  applied in order to support the property—for example, the element must
  have a layout in order to get scrollbars.

• Once a layout is applied the “hasLayout” flag is set. This property returns
  true if queried.

Read more on hasLayout.

Posted by Dion Almaer at 6:57 am