are supposed to look, and the CSS specification doesn't clearly say how they should accept style. Because of this every browser maker did what they do best... Their own damned thing and to hell with what anyone else is doing. IE has a fixed extra px padding over which you have no control, ignores height and obeys line-height. FF has extra EM padding you have no control over and ignores line-height while obeying height. Opera treats all of them exactly as if they were inline-block with no extra padding... and webkit... Don't even get me STARTED about webkit based browsers and form elements. You'll spend most of your life digging for browser specific CSS settings to strip their extra crap off them. Usually I just give up, set the borders to the same as my desired background color, then put a image behind them or wrap them in elements that actually accept style in a consistent manner. in THEORY -webkit-appearance:none; may help on those elements, but I wouldn't count on it. Pixel perfect with forms as a rule of thumb - not going to happen.

http://community.sitepoint.com/t/selection-box-height-not-equal-to-textboxes/7739

New idea/feature with postscript: you change your code, you're done. Fifteen seconds not ten years. The limitations of what you can do with HTML5 et al are still severe.

"Chromatic type

Fancy metal or wood type from the second half of the 19th century. According to Ringwalt in his American Encyclopedia of Printing and Bookbinding (1871): type made of metal or wood for color printing and so arranged that there are duplicate or triplicate copies of each letter, which, after being printed, respectively, in different colors, on a given space, blend together in a harmonious whole. Chromatic types were shown regularly in foundry type specimen books of the 1840s and 1850s.

Rob Roy Kelly describes the early history: Chromatic types were first produced as wood type by Edwin Allen, and shown by George Nesbitt in his 1841 Fourth Specimen of Machinery Cut Wood Type. Both William H. Page in 1859, and J.G. Cooley in c.1859, showed several pages of Chromatic type in each of their wood type specimen books. Page showed these types in most of his specimen books in the 1870s. The high point of Chromatic wood type production came in 1874 when the William H. Page Wood Type Co. issued their 100-page Specimens of Chromatic Type & Borders. Though Hamilton, Morgans & Wilcox, and Heber Wells all showed samples of Chromatic types through the rest of the century, none of these ever reached the level of intricate precision attained in Page's 1874 masterpiece."

Color Typeface
http://luc.devroye.org/color.html