Bug 18242 – :hover should work with links only in quirks mode

• Component: CSS
• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

[jasneet]

I Steps:
Go to 
http://managerzone.com/
Scroll to the bottome of the page.
Mouseover on the footer text.

II Issue:
The text changes color from gray to white on mouseover (example mouseover on Copyright text). The links don't change the color only the non-hyperlink text does.

III Conclusion:
.bottom_links:hover { color: #ffffff; } is causing the issue. IE/FF don't honor the above if it is not the hyperlink while Safari/Opera do.

IV Other browsers:
IE7: ok
FF3: ok
Opera9.24: not ok

V Nightly tested: 31386

[jasneet]

Created attachment 20242 [details]
screenshot

[jasneet]

Created attachment 20243 [details]
reduction

[Robert Blaut]

The test case is rendered in quirks mode. So Firefox behaves like IE and doesn't honor :hover on other elements than links as IE does it in earlier implementations. 

The CSS 2.1 standard says that :hover applies to all elements, not only to links. So according standard the issue is not bug. It's expected behavior. But if we want to be consistent with Firefox and IE in quirks mode we should consider the issue as a real bug.

What we should do with this issue? Is it a really needed to extend quirks mode to this case also? 

[Tab Atkins]

I've pinged Henri Sivonen from Mozilla to see if he feels it's an important quirk that we should emulate.

I believe we should minimize the number of quirks that we support, and only add new ones if vitally necessary.

[L. David Baron]

WebKit also has the quirk for raw :hover, as Gecko does.  Gecko used to have the quirk for .class:hover as well, but that was removed in Firefox 6 in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=197686

[Tab Atkins]

In current Firefox (greater than FF3), we have matching quirks.  We both match raw ":hover" on links only when in quirks mode, but match ".class:hover" on everything.

So, looks like nothing should be changed.