Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-multicol] How do elements between column-span and its multicol ancestor appear around the span (#1072)

Warning: this is a bit of a side track, but it's kind of useful to discuss why the thing discussed in https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1072#issuecomment-492532021 is on the horizon if we want to use its probable existence as a justification for how we should name things.

What you're describing in https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1072#issuecomment-492563161 is different mechanism that we're also of exploring, and which does have with some degree of lineage to the opera paged overflow you mentioned. A very rough outline of how that might work is in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-overflow-4/#fragmentation, and clearer details about first steps towards that are in https://drafts.csswg.org/css-overflow-3/#fragmentation. In this, `max-lines` plays the role for which you thought (and I agree) that `column-height` would be a poor name, and the `continue` property is responsible for turning the div into a (repeating) fragmentainer.

However, while this is more powerful because it can apply not just to multicol, but also to all sorts of layout systems, it's also way more complicated than something specific to multicol. The thing I described in https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1072#issuecomment-492532021 wouldn't really need to be thought of as nested fragmentainers: the columns are the only fragmenting things, and the only question is where we place them. They're either arranged in 1d as today, or this proposes laying them out in 2d, but from the point of view of the content in it, there's no nesting going on (spanners make that a bit more messy, but not that much more messy, so I won't get into that here).

Somewhere around 2012 (at least at the Hamburg F2F), we briefly considered this, and similarly to the comment you made above, though that it wasn't needed because we could use some kind of nested fragmentation on demand, or css-regions (which were still a contender back then). But time has since proven that going that way was much harder, and multicol is still without a reasonable solution for being useful in continuous medium.

Since then, we have also developed, via flexbox, grid, and css-alignment a set of concepts and properties that would readily apply to this kind of 2d layout of columns.

I do expect that we'll eventually solve the problem of generic on-demand fragmentation (and I'll be pushing for it), but I now want the multicol-specific thing as well, and hope to push for it soon. I believe that quite a few people are interested as well.

Of course I can't know before we do it that it'll work out, but if we can pick internal terminology that doesn't make that project more confusing than necessary, that'd be good.

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Received on Wednesday, 15 May 2019 09:34:20 UTC