button padding issue

[Chandra]

As we all know by now, consistently styling form elements with CSS is virtually impossible. However, with a few tweaks and after reading Firefox’s user-agent CSS file forms.css, I discovered the following:

button::-moz-focus-inner,  input[type="reset"]::-moz-focus-inner,  input[type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner,  input[type="submit"]::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="file"] > input[type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner {

border: 1px dotted transparent;

padding: 0 2px;

}

… Firefox uses pseudo-elements within the button elements themselves for drawing. As you can see above, this means that padding of 2px is added to the top and bottom of this inner pseudo-element, therefore it may be removed as follows:

button::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="submit"]::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="reset"]::-moz-focus-inner {

padding: 0 !important;

border: 0 none !important;

}

… thereby removing the padding (and in this case, the inner border too, as it was extra spacing not required; however I suspect it is used for the dotted selection border visible when a button has the focus.)

For completeness, I generally enclose such Firefox-specific code as below, more as a descriptive markup than anything else, however it serves to stop the rules being interpreted by any other browser, also being useful for targeting Firefox-only CSS:

/* Used within FF chrome to target CSS to specific URLs: being FF-specific,

it is also useful for targeting FF-only code */

@-moz-document url-prefix(http://) {

button::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="button"]::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="submit"]::-moz-focus-inner, input[type="reset"]::-moz-focus-inner {

padding: 0 !important;

border: 0 none !important;

}

}

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