Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-display] BFC roots may not be block boxes

@Loirooriol It's important to note the purpose of this definition - it's *not* to provide spec prose, it's to give a helpful search-friendly term that hopefully people will land on when they see the term "BFC" thrown around on Stack Overflow or something.  Thus why it's referring to "informal" definitions.

> "BFC" refers to the formatting context established by these boxes, not to the boxes themselves.

Informally, it often refers to the box itself as well.  We use that a lot when discussing the spec, and people throw it around when discussing hacks - things like "you need to make the div a BFC so it'll contain the floats".

> If in point 1 you already included all block containers that establish a BFC, why are you repeating block boxes in point 2?

Because they're different and don't repeat themselves.  "Block container" includes inline-blocks, which we do indeed sometimes include when talking about BFCs. But sometimes it's used to refer solely to *block-level* ones; for example, when we discuss the four flow values, we often refer to `block flow-root` as the BFC value.

> Huh? I don't see the relationship between a BFC and e.g. a block-level flex container. It establishes a FFC, not a BFC.

Again, we're talking about informal definitions. If you're, for example, trying to understand how a flex container with a preceding sibling float behaves, it's not uncommon to call the flex container a "BFC" informally, because this term is already heavily used when describing the "overflow:hidden" hack for blocks, and similar tricks to trigger the creation of a block formatting context.

@SelenIT 

> Regarding the last point, flex/grid items and table cells/captions do establish the BFC for their content,

No, they establish formatting contexts. Only flow-layout stuff establishes *block* formatting contexts.

> Wouldn't it make sense to make the term normative and use it there instead, for brevity and readability?

Not particularly.  The term isn't used all that often anyway, and we're often referring to the more generic notion of formatting contexts.  Normatively using an acronym would just make it more jargon-y.

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Received on Thursday, 6 July 2017 00:32:37 UTC