Re: inline vs inline-block

Michael,

Thanks for this. For reference, we are keeping the default as is.

-Erik


On Fri, Feb 9, 2018 at 8:33 AM, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <
cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com> wrote:

>
> > On Feb 9, 2018, at 2:55 AM, Philip Fennell <Philip.Fennell@marklogic.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > I don't know if the default should be inline-block though. In fact,
> > > I don't know if any default is useful in practice, as you usually
> > > want to layout a form in a very specific way and no default is likely
> > > to be acceptable.
> >
> > +1
>
> A well chosen default is useful in at least two ways:
>
> - When teaching classes in XForms (as in anything else), the quicker
> one can get something to the stage of looking Not Hopelessly Ugly,
> the better.
>
> A default that makes a form look the way we will want it to look after
> a few days' or weeks’ honing its appearance — that doesn’t exist.  But
> a default that makes a beginner’s form look like something they can
> imagine improving is good, and a default that makes a beginner’s form
> look like something out of a nightmare is less good.
>
> XMetal had a really nice algorithm for guessing which elements in
> an unknown XML vocabulary for which it  had no CSS rules should
> be blocks and which should be phrase-level elements. The result was
> that it was easy to go from zero to something you could at least read
> comfortably in a couple minutes.
>
> If it can be done without backward compatibility nightmares, it might
> be worth while looking up that algorithm and using a variant of it.
>
> - When developing a form for deployment, either you supply CSS
> rules for every element, class, and context that could conceivably
> matter, or you supply CSS rules for elements that don’t currently
> look right and for which the default needs to be overridden.
>
> The first approach is surely more bullet-proof, but I don’t think I’ve
> ever met anyone who didn’t take the second approach.
>
>
> There is only one case I can remember where after experience using
> a technology I thought not only that the default chosen was wrong,
> but that it would have been better not to have a default, so that every
> single user had to specify a behavior every single time.  Even a wrong
> default is almost always better than no default.
>
>
>
> >
> > From: <ebruchez@gmail.com> on behalf of Erik Bruchez <
> ebruchez@orbeon.com>
> > Date: Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 19:13
> > To: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
> > Cc: XForms <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
> > Subject: Re: inline vs inline-block
> > Resent-From: <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
> > Resent-Date: Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 19:13
> >
> > I suspect that when XForms 1.0 came out, inline-block was not quite a
> thing yet. For example [1] Firefox 2 from late 2006 had this behind a flag.
> >
> > I don't know if the default should be inline-block though. In fact, I
> don't know if any default is useful in practice, as you usually want to
> layout a form in a very specific way and no default is likely to be
> acceptable.
> >
> > -Erik
> >
> > [1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=inline-block
> >
> > On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 2:50 AM, Steven Pemberton <
> steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> wrote:
> >> Throughout the spec we distinguish between block and inline display.
> >>
> >> For instance: "Unless otherwise specified, controls have an inline
> layout by default (e.g. for a host language that supports CSS, the default
> styling should be display:inline)."
> >>
> >> However, if I ever explicitly set a display property in the CSS to
> inline, it almost always to display: inline-block, principally because you
> can set height and width.
> >>
> >> Should be specify this?
> >>
> >> Steven
> >>
>
> ********************************************
> C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
> Black Mesa Technologies LLC
> cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com
> http://www.blackmesatech.com
> ********************************************
>
>