Re: Exposing the critical ACTUAL style values?

Shelby Moore wrote:

>After many years, apparently W3C DOM (thru Level 3) does not yet expose the
>actual rendered values for critical layout style such as left, top, width,
>height, and z-index:
>  
>
[...]

>MORE IMPORTANTLY, it appears to be impossible to use exclusively W3C
>standards to create applications based on a browser engine, because there
>is no standard API to interact with the renderer/layout engine.  This seems
>like an extremely important issue for platform standards.  Now we have to
>choose between Mozilla or IE's proprietary APIs.  The former not well
>documented and not mature as a runtime environment, and the latter not
>cross-platform and open.
>  
>
I lead the effort to try to produce such a standard for what I believe 
you are requesting.  Unfortunately, it did not have the backing of 
enough participants besides myself (not any that I can remember towards 
the end).

>IMHO, W3C is too silent about a core standard which will become a defacto
>proprietary standard otherwise.  Is this by design (i.e. W3C politics)??
>
>Apologies in advance if I have missed some DOM Activity on this matter.
>Hopefully I have demonstrated with links above, that I have researched this
>issue.  I start this to thread to collect the research (and replies to
>follow) from others.
>
>ALSO, there are the issues of exposing rendered selection, focus, and
>scrolling.  I started reading the Views and Formatting for CSS3 and
>appeared on cursory browse that these issues are not addressed??
>
It is an important issue, but until a lot of member companies take 
interest in the work that was done and left due to lack of interest, I 
do not see how it would move forwards.

Any outside companies or organizations are certainly free to work 
towards a standard either using the initial draft (very unproven and 
incomplete) or their own.

I agree with you 100%, but there isn't a lot that can be done until we 
have a group of companies interested in it.

See

http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-3-Views/views-formatting.html

Ray Whitmer
rayw@netscape.com