Re: [css3-multicol] floats that overflow columns

Alex Mogilevsky wrote:
> We had discussions before on behavior of floats in multicol layout [1], 
> which I believe led to this resolution from June F2F…
> 
>  ...
> 
>    RESOLVED: howcome to add an example of a float intruding into previous
>              columns and wait for implementors to complain
>  
> Here is what I propose for floats in multicol:
> 
> 1)      In [multicol] spec, remove special treatment for overflow of 
> floats. Overflow floats should be clipped to the column exactly as any 
> other kind of overflow would. This way, content that was initially 
> designed for single-column layout has same behavior.
> 
> 2)      Leave definition of floats that intrude across columns to GCPM 
> [2]. In fact, page floats as currently defined in GCPM are powerful 
> enough to work as shown in [1].
> 
> I do realize that taking this proposal would make a subset of cases 
> difficult to implement, e.g. “float this element to the right edge of 
> whatever column it happens to be, then allow it to intrude into previous 
> columns”. As a designer, I think I would be willing to live with such 
> limitation, especially if both regular floats and page floats were 
> available. And of course as implementer I would appreciate having 
> multicolumn layout slightly easier to implement…

I think I would prefer if instead of 1) we let floats intrude into later
columns, but not into earlier columns. I.e. floats can intrude into other
columns, but they always overflow the end edge, never the start edge, of
their block. I'm not sure how hard it would be to handle that sort of
clipping behavior, but the layout part is straightforward.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 10 August 2009 21:23:36 UTC