What ever that "certain way" it's supposed to act, someone obviously wants it to act different if they set a height and width. Having to redefine the display time is a needless extra step that the user has to "just know" when the intention could easily be inferred.
> Width and height are meaningless for inline elements
Really not sure what you're trying to get at there, obviously any element that displays will have a width and height. Maybe you meant a user specified width/height, but the entire point of my post is an inline-block is an inline element with a specifiable width and height. And we've always had the IMG tag, which is also an inline element with a specifiable width and height. The obvious and intuitive choice would have been to not put artificial limits on inline elements.