conditional floats on paged media

You're writing a paper on computer science. For illustrative purposes,
you include short code snippets.

Since they are short and since you don't want the reader to be
distracted by back and forth page flipping to grasp the code, you
disallow page breaks inside the snippets.

On the other hand, you don't want to waste precious space either. You
are prepared for the snippets to be taken out of the normal flow and
floated on the top of the next page, but only if on the current page
there's no sufficient room in the natural position in the flow.

You only care that your snippets' listings are visually rendered as a
whole. You prefer positioning inside the normal flow if there's
sufficient room. Otherwise, you accept an out of flow positioning, on
the next page. Of course, you are prepared for forced breaks if the
snippets are longer than a page.

There are CSS working drafts about:

* "CSS Paged Media Module Level 3" (http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-page/)
* "CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module"
(http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/)

There are new float properties and controls for page breaks but they do
not seem to solve the problem above, not even when combined. Floats are
unconditional and avoiding page breaks wastes space.

Are there plans to add "conditional" floats to the mentioned specifications?

Thanks
Michel Onoff

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2012 22:19:32 UTC