Is this font: shorthand property syntax valid? (My reading of the spec says yes, but half of my installed browsers disagree.)

Question

Is this valid? font: bold 10px/13px inherit;

According to my reading of the specs that should mean a font-weight of 'bold', a font-family of 'inherit', a font-size of '10px', and a line-height of '13px'.

It appears to work correctly in Internet Explorer 8 (8.0.6001.18702).

It works correctly in Safari 5.0.4 (7533.20.27) on Windows.

Opera 11.01 (build 1190) and Firefox 3.6.16 both log errors about it.

I haven't tried Chrome or Firefox 4 yet.

If this is indeed supposed to be valied is this parsing bug a known issue?

A couple extra points:

• The W3 validator also reports this as being invalid.
• None of 'font: bold 10px inherit;', 'font: bold 10px/13px;', or 'font: bold 10px;' work correctly in firefox here either.

Update

As pointed out by Adam Wagner in his answer my attempted value is in fact not valid (despite what my naive reading of the spec suggested) due to § C.3.1 of the CSS2.1 spec.

Answer 1

I think the issue is with the "inherit" addition to your value.

Per the specs:

[ [ <'font-style'> || <'font-variant'> || <'font-weight'> ]? <'font-size'> [ / <'line-height'> ]? <'font-family'> ] | caption | icon | menu | message-box | inherit

I think the bold section I listed above is one option, and "caption", "icon", "menu", "message-box", and "inherit" are the remaining options.

In short, try: font: bold 10px/13px

Update:

It appears webkit has an outstanding bug report on this very problem. Not sure about firefox. (https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20181)

Also, as someone in the ticket mentions, the 2.1 spec addresses this:

"Shorthand properties take a list of subproperty values or the value 'inherit'. One cannot mix 'inherit' with other subproperty values as it would not be possible to specify the subproperty to which 'inherit' applied. The definitions of a number of shorthand properties did not enforce this rule: 'border-top', 'border-right', 'border-bottom', 'border-left', 'border', 'background', 'font', 'list-style', 'cue', and 'outline'."

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html#q142