Sample HTML/CSS:

<div class="container">
    <input type="text" />
    <div class="filler"></div>
</div>

div.container {
    padding: 5px;
    border: 1px solid black;
    background-color: gray;
}

div.filler {
    background-color: red;
    height: 5px;
}

input {
    display: block;
}

http://jsfiddle.net/bPEkb/3/

Question

Why doesn't the input box expand to have the same outer width as, say div.filler? That is to say, why doesn't the input box expand to fit its container like other block elements with width: auto; do?

I tried checking the "User Agent CSS" in Firebug to see if I could come up with something there. No luck. I couldn't find any specific differences in CSS that I could specifically link to the input box behaving differently from the regular div.filler.

Besides curiousity, I'd like to know why this is to get to the bottom of it to figure out a way to set width once and forget it. My current practice of explicitly setting the width of both input and its containing block element seems redundant and less than modular. While I'm familiar with the technique of wrapping the input element in a div then assigning to the input element negative margins, this seems quite undesirable.