Re: Exposing Fundamental Primitives (was: [css-regions] Named Flows, Elements and Box Generation)

On Monday 2013-10-28 17:35 -0700, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 5:29 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> > On Monday 2013-10-28 17:02 -0700, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> >> Regions, or at least something very similar to them, are clearly the
> >> primitive underlying Multicol and some of the more exotic Page
> >> features.
> >
> > I don't think so -- these other features all describe their layout
> > model in a way allows implementations to do layout in a specific
> > order without such a multi-pass model.  And I'm not convinced that
> > the complex multi-pass model is regions actually allows describing
> > things like the intrinsic sizing of multicol.
> 
> This is also fine.  It's okay for the sugar to optimize things better
> than authors can achieve on their own.
> 
> Sizing is a whole nother thing to eventually expose.  We're chipping
> away at this piece by piece; don't think it's worthless just because
> not everything has been revealed yet.

I don't think "expose" is what regions is doing here.  This isn't a
pre-existing primitive.  Sure, you can make it a new primitive and
rebuild other things on top of it -- but that doesn't make it the
thing they were built on before, nor does it make it the right
primitive to build them on (which I don't think it is).

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)