The solution I posted does NOT solve the problem. An !important rule in the User Agent style sheet cannot be over-ridden by an author style sheet.

As of 2010-FEB-08 (and as far as I know), there remains no solution.

Bill

As usual, I stmbled across your site today while surfing for a CSS solution. My problem was with Firefox/Win. I’m on Ubuntu, and oddly enough, the issue doesn’t exist there.

I’m developing an Armenian/English translator and I noticed that FF/Win was chopping off the bottoms of some of the Armenian glyphs in text input boxes. I assumed a line-height:1.5 rule would help, but quickly noticed that Firefox was ignoring any line-height settings on input elements.

A quick check in Firebug revealed that the FF/Win style sheet is declaring input{line-height:normal!important;}.

Re-declaring !important and over-specifying the selector, I changed the style sheet on the site to this:
:root input[type=text]{line-height:1.5!important;}
…which fixed the problem.

I’m posting it here since this page came up during my Google search and anybody searching in the future might benefit from this tidbit. Hope you don’t mind. :)
–Bill

It doesn’t work in 6.0.2900…..

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/rugose

Stay on groovin’ (Say what?) safari,
Tor

2. Thanks for the bug 399636 reference. I”ll argue that what Gecko does is deeply unexpected, and very possibly incorrect. If I go into any text editor, set the font to “Webdings”, and type “Oy!”, I”ll get three symbols—the glyphs defined in that font for the characters I input. In Gecko 1.9, I get substitutes from an entirely different and unrelated font face. That makes very, very little sense to me (and, I”d wager, to almost anyone).

What Gecko 1.9 does is absolutely correct and expected in a Unicode world. If this were 1990, I”d (possibly) agree with your statement, but not in a Unicode world. When you typed “Oy!”, you requested the glyphs for “O” “y” and “!”, not those for “ear”, “circle with a horizontal line through the center”, and “spider”[1]. If Webdings does not contain the glyphs “O” “y” and “!”, then the application should select another font that does contain those glyphs in order to display “Oy!” properly. Gecko 1.9 does this.

Changing a font face should never change the glyph displayed. Unicode requires every glyph to have a unique “id”, and the only way to display that glyph is to use its id; interoperability (and machine comprehensibility) depends on it. Or, put another way, think of the glyphs like HTML structure and the font face as CSS presentation; if I have a <p> element somewhere and I change the font-size for that <p> in CSS, that doesn”t suddenly turn the <p> into an <h1> element.

By the way, I don”t know what text editor you”re using, but in any Unicode-based application, changing the font to Webdings and typing “Oy!” produces the glyphs “Oy!” (try in TextEdit on Mac OS X, for instance).

[1] As long as you didn”t first switch to a dingbats keyboard layout; if you used a Unicode dingbats layout to request the Unicode glyphs for “ear”, “circle with a horizontal line through the center”, and “spider” (or whatever they may be called), you should see those glyphs provided you have a font that contains them.