[css-overflow-3] Clarify padding in overflow content · Issue #129 · w3c/csswg-drafts (original) (raw)

can cause pages which previously didn't have scrollbars to suddenly have scrollbars

Yes, I understand the issue here but actually, it is expected. Padding can cause overflow.
What is unexpected is browsers trying to workaround this expected behavior with an unexpected one.
If you go this way, padding-top can cause overflow when it's unecessary why the spec didn't decide to ignore padding-top too ? Because it breaks something, and it will be very visible. It's the same thing with padding-bottom, if you ignore it, even if it's less visible, it breaks something.

Moreover, Blink has the highest market share, it does not implement the behavior introduced in CSS 2.1 and there is no screams about it (actually maybe there are screams, I really don't know, but blink team does not need 6 years to implement something the dev community wants).

The issue here is the developer is not in control. The spec introduced a behavior which can be unexpected but didn't give to the developer the opportunity to control it (with something like overflow-clip?)

existing Web content limits what we can do

CSS 2.1 broke existing web content because of this change too. Web is a living thing.