There seems to have been a change to the Post new comment area of the standard template, and to the Reply template (unless my memory is worse than I thought), and for me (i.e. in IE6 SP2) it's not an improvement.
There's a new drop-down list labelled 'Format as:' which contains 4 empty options, the subject box is not full width and for some reason is right justified, the textarea for the actual comment has lost its right border and does not have the rich text editor option, the help/hints are missing, and there's no Preview option any more (which I really liked).
We're working on it.
I'm looking at this at the moment with IE6 SP2, and I am not seeing the empty options. We removed the preview button on purpose and there are still some formatting issues to work over (such as your comment on the subject box). It looks to me like the right border on the textarea is actually there but not styled (i.e. there's a default style that we have no overridden with IE).
We feel that the standard Drupal comment reply template is...about as unfriendly as it gets, and so we've begun porting the work I did on the comment section at api.dojotoolkit.org to the entire dojotoolkit.org site.
In terms of the Rich Text Editor open, we believe that this was also an impediment to most posts, particularly when the default posting option is Filtered HTML.
I'm not sure what happened to the tips/help (API has it as a flyout dialog), we'll look into that one.
... i wonder if the empty
... i wonder if the empty options are for lower acl's ?
I haven't seen the comment
I haven't seen the comment section in the API documentation - presumably I would need to register and login - but if you are in the process of porting it's understandable there would be some formatting issues. I think you may be right about the border being there but not styled (or else somehow the textarea is just one pixel wide than its container) - if you make the comment long enough to need a scrollbar, it appears precisely on the right edge, but still without the right border. I'm a little sad to lose the Preview option - it's saved me from posting some badly formatted stuff at times - but I can understand that it may also cause problems, and I suppose I can always use the Edit option afterwards if I have made an error.
Dante's suggestion about the access levels affecting the "Format As" option list is a possibility, I would think - certainly my access level is, I presume, the lowest. The options definitely do not show up for me - if I view the source HTML, this is what I see (reformated slightly to wrap the lines):
<div class="content"><div class="form-wrapper" id="comment-form-wrapper">
<form action="" method="post" id="comment-form">
<input type="hidden" name="form_token" id="edit-form-token" value="14a9364f8267d2fe0ccb056bc49ce8d9" />
<input type="hidden" name="form_id" id="edit-comment-form" value="comment_form" />
<table class="comment-form-layout"><tr><td class="comment-label" valign="middle" nowrap="true"></td>
<td valign="top" align="right"><span class="label">Format as: </span>
<select class="format-select" name="format" id="edit-format"><option value=""></option><option value=""></option>
<option value="" selected="true"></option><option value="" selected="true"></option></select></td></tr>
<tr><td class="comment-label" valign="middle" nowrap="true">Subject:</td>
<td class="comment-input" valign="top">
<input type="text" class="input-text" name="subject" id="edit-subject" maxlength="64" value="" /></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><textarea name="comment" id="edit-comment" class="input-textarea"></textarea>
</td></tr></table>
<div class="form-bottom">
<input class="form-button" type="submit" name="op" id="edit-submit" value="Post comment" />
</div></form></div></div>
Wrt to the tips/help, it would be nice to get them back - I can't always remember all the allowed tags, code styles etc. The Rich Text editor I never actually used, just noticed it was gone.