Re: Initial values for widows and orphans

On 11/12/2012, at 10:53 AM, Dean Jackson <dino@apple.com> wrote:

> 
> On 11/12/2012, at 8:56 AM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 12/10/2012 01:34 PM, Dean Jackson wrote:
>>> I just added support for 'widows' and 'orphans' to WebKit [1].
>>> 
>>> Unfortunately, in order to not break existing content, I couldn't use the specified initial values of 2.
>>> 
>>> Instead I had to go against the spec and accept a value of 'auto'
>>> and have that be the initial value. In WebKit, this means do nothing
>>> (do not try to avoid widows or orphans).
>> 
>> widows and orphans only accept integers. If you want "do nothing", why
>> aren't you using 1 as the initial value?
> 
> OK. I'll change it to 1.

Sorry for talking to myself, but I'm not convinced 1 is any better than auto. Despite my protestations below, it could be that we *do* want to respect widows and orphans at some time in the future, in some situations. I like that 'auto' has the implication that the user-agent will decide.

Someone please convince me one way or the other!

Dean

> 
>>> What was the reasoning behind having such initial values? [2] [3]
>> 
>> Probably because in general, it results in better pagination of text
>> content. It's been that way since CSS2.0.
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS2-20080411/page.html#break-inside
> 
> Sure, I get that. But my question was more about adding a property that
> "breaks" existing content. That's the position we're in. We didn't
> support the properties before now, and we can't use the initial value
> without introducing regressions.
> 
> It's not a big deal, just a minor annoyance. Technically we won't
> comply with the specification.
> 
> Dean
> 
>

Received on Monday, 10 December 2012 23:58:40 UTC