Simon Willison’s Weblog

The float label bug

12th September 2002

Strange Mozilla bug: In some versions of Mozilla / Netscape 6+ <label> elements that have a float applied to them will vanish. Tom Gilder’s test case can be viewed here. I tried it in Mozilla 1.1 beta and the page behaved as expected but Netscape 6.22 suffered from the bug. Apparently Netscape 7 still has the bug, which would suggest it was spun off from the Mozilla code base before that bug was fixed. Rust Randal’s CSS form demo gets around this problem with a span inside a label, which seems to be the most effective workaround but is frustrating as it requires additional markup to solve what is a pretty obscure bug.