IE6's whacky submit buttons

[Thomas Dowling]

Web4Libbers--

I've been vaguely bothered by this for quite a while, but it has become 
more of an issue in a design I'm working on.

In IE6 (or at least, IE6 under XP), form submit buttons start to look 
very strange if the input's value attribute exceeds some mysterious 
length.  That is, for something like '<input type="submit" 
value="Search">' you get the nicely rounded and shaded 3D button from 
the standard XP widgets.  But beyond some length, I get a crudely 
magnified button, as though someone loaded the nice native button into a 
cheap image editor and resized it, complete with serious jaggies.  My 
copies of Mozilla 1.7 and Firefox 0.9 manage to use the native button 
without this problem (Mozilla is a better integrated Windows app than 
IE?).  Opera's "Native Windows" skin also has no problems.

You can see examples of submit buttons ranging from sensible to silly at 
<http://www.ohiolink.edu/~tdowling/foo.html> along with a screenshot of 
what this can look like on my machine.  I may see this more often than 
some people because I have an unusually high screen resolution, but I do 
see it with longer submit buttons on colleagues' PCs.

I haven't been able to find anything on this problem; does anyone on the 
list know about it?  With CSS applied, I can make IE render a reasonable 
button, but for reasons of both usability and aesthetics, I'd like to 
stay with the native button.

-- 
Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu