RE: [css3-regions] Feedback on regions document

> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of David Hyatt
> Sent: Wednesday, May 11, 2011 9:14 AM
>
> (2) My second major issue with the document is that I don't believe we
> should ever allow regions to be explicit DOM elements.  I think regions
> should always be created anonymously.  

My position on this is the opposite. I think regions should be elements, most of the time if not always.

When I think of a magazine page, I think of design first. It has rich graphics (perhaps SVG, images or video), multiple small chunks of text (headlines, teasers, ads), and a few containers (linked of course) showing longer stories (400 words may already be "long" there).

Trying to decide what is content and what is presentation in that world is difficult, often subjective and IMO pointless. All that coolness needs to be described in some kind of language, why not HTML+CSS? It has the power.

Now, some of these visual are text containers. Some directly contain text (regular divs), some point at text in other files (iframes), some point at text in named flows (regions). All power of CSS is available to size and position them according do designer's taste. 

At this point I am not even sure if I am commenting on the same topic. Why would we want to insist that regions are not elements? 

Perhaps it looks odd to see in HTML source <div> with content, then another <div> showing one page of it. One way to better separate content from presentation is to put flow content in a different document (as in <iframe>). Then one or more <iframe> (or <object>) elements can provide content for regions, but the actual content is elsewhere (and authored by a different person, running different scripts in sandbox, having unrelated stylesheets too).

> I would just cut the flexible box example.  I don't think we *have* to
> make regions compatible with every last layout system we devise

Flexbox is a great tool for space distribution. It works great to precisely divide space on a fixed size page too. Consider a page with a to columns, one exactly twice as wide as the other: 
	
	#region_1 { width:flex(1); margin-right:2em; }	
	#region_2 { width:flex(2); }

There are other ways to do it (tables come to mind), but this is as simple as it gets...

Alex

Received on Thursday, 12 May 2011 11:47:34 UTC