Re: Flow around floats (proposal for float-displace)

On Wed, 13 Jan 1999, L. David Baron wrote:

>> I have serious doubts about whether this is a good idea; irregular
>> padding, margins and borders are *very* complicated to implement
>> (and their visual appeal leaves much to be desired too, IMHO).
> I don't think they would be much different in implementation from
> flow of inline elements around floats (which, I admit, is difficult,
> but it has already been done). Furthermore, this would probably be
> used mainly when there was no border and the background was
> transparent. 

Hmm.

I think a third possible solution to this problem is that instead of
'jaggeding' margin, border and padding, one merely 'jag' the padding.
This would not require an additional property, and I believe is
probably closer to what IE does now (it does not make the border
jagged, does it?).

The definition of 'marker-offset' would then be modified to be
relative to the *padding* edge, instead of the *border* edge.

Allowing jagged padding would solve three problems: lists would flow
around floats correctly, borders and margins would flow under floats
in a backwards-compatible way, and cells in tables with cells with
colspan/rowspan greater than one and irregular borders would have
rectangular content areas (see [1]).


> jaggedblock:
>   UL, OL, DIR, MENU - To prevent bullets from being over image and to
>     keep the indentation of the LI elements relative to surrounding
>     text.
>   DL - To keep the DD elements indented relative to the DT elements.
>   BLOCKQUOTE - To differentiate it from the rest of the text (this is
>     especially a problem if there are floats on both sides).
> block:
>   HR - To prevent the HR from sticking out in the margin of a floated
>     image (on the opposite side of the image)

These would all be solved if the padding is adjusted instead of the
current behaviour of flowing line boxes around floats.

References:
[1]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1998Dec/0025.html

Related resources:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1998Dec/0065.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1998Dec/0066.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1998Dec/0079.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1998Dec/0082.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/1998Dec/0083.html
http://www.bath.ac.uk/%7Epy8ieh/internet/projects/wwwstyle/MarkerNearFloatSuggestion.html
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/current/sec5526b.htm

-- 
Ian Hickson

Received on Wednesday, 13 January 1999 11:12:11 UTC