show() always uses display: block by default

[vdboord]

The jQuery .show() method always falls back to "display: block" by default. This breaks certain elements in standard compliant browsers: table elements will not display correctly in Firefox if these get "display: block", and span/a elements somehow failed to display in Konqueror 3.5.8 when they are hidden from a global CSS file before (using "display: none").

The following code is an example how this can be fixed. In Internet Explorer, assigning an unsupported value to .display will cause an error, hence the fallback to display: block below. This has been tested to work, it only needs to be incorporated into jQuery.

try {
	// Try standard compliant value first.
	// This list is incomplete but contains the mostly used elements.
	switch( element.tagName ) {
		// Special cases
		case 'TBODY': element.style.display = 'table-row-group'; break;
		case 'THEAD': element.style.display = 'table-header-group'; break;
		case 'TFOOT': element.style.display = 'table-footer-group'; break;
		case 'COL':   element.style.display = 'table-column-group'; break;
		case 'TH':    element.style.display = 'table-cell'; break;
		case 'TD':    element.style.display = 'table-cell'; break;
		case 'TR':    element.style.display = 'table-row'; break;
		case 'LI':    element.style.display = 'list-item'; break;
 
		// Inline elements
		case 'SPAN':
		case 'A':
		case 'IMG':
			element.style.display = 'inline';
			break;
 
		// Block elements
		default:
			element.style.display = 'block';
	}
}
catch(e) {
	// Fallback for Internet Explorer when display value is unsupported.
	element.style.display = 'block';
}

This fix makes workarrounds like $(el).show().css("display", "inline") obsolete.

Thanks.

[joern]

The issue with workarounds like that: You can't be sure that an element that has display:inline by default really is supposed to have inline again. You'd need to check if it isn't set to block using CSS.

Just ignoring that issue could make the situation worth, because it will be even more difficult to spot errors. So far you can at least resume that you have to manually set inline when necessary

[brandon]

Duplicate of #960 which has a patch.