RE: [css3-floats][css3-exclusions] priorities and alternatives

David, thanks for your feedback. I too agree that the web is/should move towards app vs doc centric layout model but I don't really want to make this tread the place to prove or disprove this. 

As to the suggestions you made below, I don't really see much contradictions to what (or how) we're trying to achieve. I think that after we publish the new draft a lot of the concepts will become clearer and hopefully more intuitive. Because I don’t see any concrete proposal here I'd like to repeat Vincent's invite for you to work with us on the new draft or we can discuss it once it is ready.

Thanks,
Rossen Atanassov

>-----Original Message-----
>From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On
>Behalf Of L. David Baron
>Sent: Monday, August 01, 2011 4:00 PM
>To: www-style@w3.org
>Subject: [css3-floats][css3-exclusions] priorities and alternatives
>
>The layout concepts in CSS are largely derived from the tradition of document
>layout.  That was a sensible idea at the time CSS was developed.  However, the
>evolution of the Web since then has made a significant part of the Web more like
>user interface than like documents.  User interfaces are typically designed using a
>different set of layout primitives -- a set that CSS does not provide.  Their absence
>has been a significant obstacle to users of CSS and a source of a significant portion
>of the complaints about CSS (even if those complaints are directed at details of
>CSS's current features).
>
>I believe the focus for improving layout in CSS should be on bringing in ideas from
>user interface layout into CSS, as flexbox and grid do, rather than bringing in yet
>another round of advanced document formatting features.  Thus I see work on
>css3-floats [1] / css3-exclusions as diverting energy away from the layout
>problems that we urgently need to address.
>
>I also think css3-floats is taking the wrong approach to what it is
>doing:  it is building on concepts (such as absolute positioning) that are already
>known to be problematic in terms of producing layouts that don't respond well to
>changes in device size and other device characteristics.  I think many of the
>examples highlighted as things that can be done with this specification are things
>that it won't do a good job at when faced with different devices.  For example,
>placing pull-quotes in the middle of pages using absolute positioning will lead,
>after reformatting for a different device, to some of those pull-quotes
>overlapping or flowing around each other on the same page.
>
>
>During the meeting in Seattle, I agreed (under some pressure) to describe an
>alternative to css3-floats that I would prefer that would address its use cases
>described in [2] (though I'm far from convinced of the need for use case #2, and I
>don't address it).
>
>The alternative I would like would be the combination of:
>
> * the 'wrap-shape', 'wrap-image', 'wrap-margin', and
>   'wrap-padding' features from css3-floats (or something like them)
>
> * a new property for additional float placement types similar to
>   the 'wrap-type' from css3-floats or the float types from
>   css3-gcpm [3], which allows:
>    * floats being placed some percentage of the way across their
>      container, with flow on both sides of them, but otherwise
>      similar to the current folat model
>    * floats at or near the beginning of a multi-column element
>      being placed on a column boundary (both sides of which have
>      their contents *after* the float)
>
> * a general mechanism for content reordering to address cases where
>   the floats are at a point in the content that doesn't match where
>   they ought to be positioned
>
>(Though they're not mentioned in the use cases list, I did here some mention of
>page floats as a use case -- i.e., floats to the top or bottom of a page.  If that's a
>use case, I think the correct way to address it is via a page float mechanism
>designed for exactly that
>-- figures that are pulled out of the text and float to the top or bottom of an
>appropriate page, with collision handling that pushes them to the next page.)
>
>That said, as I said above, I think this is lower priority than user interface layout
>features.
>
>-David
>
>[1] http://www.interoperabilitybridges.com/css3-floats/

>[2] http://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/css3-floats-use-cases

>[3] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#page-floats

>
>--
>π„ž   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
>𝄒   Mozilla Corporation               http://www.mozilla.com/   𝄂
>

Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2011 18:23:06 UTC