PRB: Scroll Bars Appear on Active Desktop Item (183443)

SYMPTOMS

Scroll bars appear on an Active Desktop Item even though the item has been sized exactly to fit a fixed size image, ActiveX control, or applet. The fixed size element never seems to occupy the entire space of the HTML body.

CAUSE

In HTML pages, spaces and carriage returns (CRs) are considered text characters, and text characters have descent -- space below the baseline. This causes a small section of the body to always appear underneath any fixed size elements in the page or desktop item.

MORE INFORMATION

This problem can be observed in the following sample CDF file and corresponding HTML file for a desktop item:

<?XML VERSION="1.0"?>
<CHANNEL>
   <WWITEM HREF="http://example.microsoft.com/desktopitem.htm">
      <TITLE>My Fixed Size Image Component</TITLE>
      <USAGE VALUE="DesktopComponent">
         <WIDTH VALUE="300" />
         <HEIGHT VALUE="200" />
      </USAGE>
   </WWITEM>
</CHANNEL>

<HTML>
<BODY>
<IMG SRC="xmple.jpg" width="300" height="200">
</BODY>
</HTML>

To resolve this problem, provide a little extra space in the Desktop Item's CDF file by changing the <HEIGHT> tag to the following:

<HEIGHT VALUE="305" />

-or- Remove all white space from the HTML file like so:

<HTML><BODY><IMG SRC="xmple.jpg" width="300" height="200"></BODY></HTML>

REFERENCES

For additional information, please see the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

183328 BUG: Empty Vertical Scroll Bar Space On Desktop Item