Re: CSS Regions considered harmful

On Jan 29, 2014, at 8:58 PM, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> 
>> On 01/28/2014 11:23 AM, Edward O'Connor wrote:
>> Hi Håkon,
>> 
>> You wrote:
>> 
>>> My primary point is that we should not abuse HTML tags as this is
>>> harmful to web semantics. That's problems #1
>> 
>> Agreed.
>> 
>>> and it should, alone, be enough to stop the [CSS Regions]
>>> specification from progressing.
>> 
>> Disagreed. Regions currently relies on dummy elements because the WG has
>> not made progress on defining features for explicitly creating boxes in
>> CSS. Once we have such features, content can be flowed into them with
>> the properties defined in CSS Regions.
>> 
>> Instead of applying stop energy to a spec that defines necessary
>> features (how to flow content through boxes of different sizes), we
>> should instead prioritize making progress on defining new box creation
>> mechanisms so that authors won't have to resort to dummy elements.
> 
> If the spec were pared down to defining how to flow content through
> boxes of different sizes, maybe some of these objections would go
> away. Like CSS Fragmentation, it would not be usable on its own, but
> would be relied on by other modules (Named Flows, Overflow Fragments,
> Page Templates, Template Slots, etc.) that are attempting to solve
> the region-creation problem. Adobe and Microsoft could work on it in
> the context of Named Flows, Mozilla and Opera could work on it in the
> context of Overflow Fragments, and nobody would object to progressing
> "a spec that defines necessary features (how to flow content through
> boxes of different sizes)".

That sounds reasonable on the face of it, but doesn't CSS Fragmentation do that already? What parts of Regions would not be contained in a "named flows" spec?

Received on Thursday, 30 January 2014 15:51:56 UTC