miscoded

Element dimension properties is such an unstandardised mess. Do not ask me to be your guide through this maze, but below is at least some documentation of how scrollHeight behaves in IE.

If element does not have "height" specified, scrollHeight returns height of element contents + padding + border (in other words exactly what offsetHeight does).

If height is specified scrollHeight returns height of element contents + padding only.

As for Opera, we seem to have some bugs. The problem with getting it right is that the scrollHeight beast is not in any standard, so we just have to try to do "what IE does" and discover through users reporting problems out there that we actually missed out half of the logic and ended up doing something entirely different and incompatible.

This is why standards are good for you.

What Opera does: scrollHeight returns border-top-width + padding-top + height of element contents (!). How did we get there? Including only half of the border and padding width - top but not bottom values?? I don't have a clue.