Re: [gcpm] border-parts

On Oct 29, 2008, at 3:02 PM, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

>
> The 'border-parts' property [1] was discussed at the recent f2f
> meeting of the CSS WG. The purpose of this property is to split the
> border into parts where every other part is visible. This gives us a
> flexible model to express common borders, e.g., for footnotes.
>
> Two additions were discussed:
>
>  - the 'repeat()' function for repeating patterns
>  - the 'fr' unit as per css3-grid [2]
>
> I've added a description of how this could work i [1] with some
> examples. Feedback welcome.
>
> [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/Overview.html#border
> [2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-grid/
>
> Cheers,
>
> -h&kon
>              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
> howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome
>

It still looks to me like you are trying to define the dashes in a  
dashed line, which would be awesome. But it seems kludgey to use a  
"solid" (not "dashed") border with dashes in it, just for the single  
use case of wanting a short line segment over a footnote. This is  
"underloading" what it means to have a dashed line (not solid at all),  
and overloading "border" if all you really want is a short, horizontal  
line segment. Has HR been deprecated? It seems to be what you are  
actually trying to have in your use case; an HR with a width. If there  
was no CSS, you would probably still want the HR there to provide the  
semantic meaning of "separator of different kinds of content".