Progress on multicol historical issues / updated DoC

I’ve been digging through the www-style archives as time allows, and have fished out a fair few seemingly unresolved issues and other things relating to multicol.

It may well be that some of these are irrelevant due to bits of the spec now being covered by other things, in particular css-break, or they may have been dealt with and I’ve not turned up the details yet. As I wasn’t part of the WG during most of these discussions I don’t have the benefit of reading some of this stuff and it reminding me of some long past discussion. 

So … I’ve done a few things.

1. Created a spreadsheet that may make sense only to me, but is essentially my attempt to stop going round in circles looking at the same issue in multiple threads. I think it is set up to enable comments by anyone, if anyone spots something wildly inaccurate although mostly this is all now represented in the below two places.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XkIezBdv_gLbU3FxelgW4ZKdqln9D4UtMN85Xc09slQ/edit?usp=sharing <https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XkIezBdv_gLbU3FxelgW4ZKdqln9D4UtMN85Xc09slQ/edit?usp=sharing>

2. Updated the list in the DoC, and committed that back to the drafts repo.That includes things that were discussed and resolved upon, many of which aren’t in the Changes section of the current draft so I’ve tried to scoop those up.

3. Anything that appears to be an open issue, now also has an issue on GitHub. If you’ve been involved in a multicol issue over the last 6 years you can take a trip down memory lane. If you know that issue was dealt with or of further discussion, or just have thoughts here in 2017, please comment on those.

I started to put together a project in GitHub to group the issues together as a bit of a worklist for me as it saves constantly searching the issues to find things. https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/projects/4 <https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/projects/4>

If you know of an issue I haven’t yet included. Let me know.

*STATE OF THE TEST SUITE*

Repeatedly through the years is mention of the state of the test suite, the fact that tests were submitted and not reviewed etc. I think my next move involves having a look at where that all is. Again, I don’t have historical context.

Were all the tests that ended up on WPT reviewed by anything other than the original submitter? If someone knows the history that would be helpful.

*STATUS OF THE SPEC*

The last time there was much work done on the spec seems to have been in September 2013, after making some edits suggested that the spec goes back to LC: https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Sep/0363.html <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Sep/0363.html>

Being new to this, I don’t know much about process and how the WG makes that decision, but I’m sure someone can enlighten me :)

Anyhow, this is mostly just by way of an update, I’ll keep working on it as I have time.


— 

Rachel Andrew

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