Re: flowing around both sides of a float

Brad Kemper wrote:

> 
> 2. float:center is what I said is pretty clear. It would work just like 
> float:left and float:right in most regards, which would continue to work 
> as they do now. Item would move to center, and text (and other inline 
> content) would flow around it in the direction of the text. The flow of 
> text would stop at the item and then continue on the other side. 

That isn't actually obvious.  I am pretty sure that have seen displays 
(which I seem to remember is the older term for the lower level 
primitive of a block that is taken out of line, but with main stream 
text flowed around it) with the format treated as having two columns 
around the display, rather than having each line individually split. 
Splitting lines works for reasonably narrow columns with even narrower 
displays, but becomes difficult to read if the display is reasonably 
wide, because one has to match up the correct line on the other side. 
If one had to choose one option, I would go for the additional column 
option, rather than the split line one.

Actually, I've just done a quick scan of some of the magazines and 
newspapers I have around (mainly English, but also a paper and magazine 
in Simplified Chinese).  I can't find any centred displays (with text 
around both sides).  On the other hand, I can find several displays 
(pulled quotes, images, supplementary text, that are symmetrically 
floated right in one column and left in the next column, so it would 
seem that that has better use cases than centring in a single column. 
(There are also ones spanning several two or more columns completely, 
some which are unbalanced, and, at least one that was quite narrow, but 
with edges cropped to the image it contained, and placed between 
columns, so as to take irregular chunks out of two columns.)

I have a suspicion that the only time I've seen displays centred within 
a column, they have have not had rectangular outlines.

-- 
David Woolley
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Received on Tuesday, 1 January 2008 22:51:26 UTC