CSS Pages and Pagination (was: Prioritisation)

On 05/08/2015 18:13, Deborah Kaplan wrote:

> This discussion is all quite interesting, and a good one to have, but I
> just want to clarify -- the way pages and references are being discussed
> here are more relevant to the meaning of "pages" which is not part of
> the CSS prioritization document under the original discussion. Unless I
> am misunderstanding again! In which case maybe we should change the
> subject line. :-)

Yes. Done. And that discussion would be better held in www-style than
here, IMHO...

While I'm here, let me give my PoV on Pages and CSS, please.

Whatever is a page, CSS are going to be used to count them. So
the insertion of a reference to a given page - or to a page
containing a given text or a given node - will be done at least
partly through CSS. Since the whole thing smells, looks and
feels like generated content, the natural host for this is
probably CSS, even if I agree we're slightly leaving the field of
pure styling to reach higher-level features.

I'm all in favor of it. We have been sitting on these features
for far too long and I prefer having them in CSS even they not
entirely belong there rather than arguing forever again about where it
should land.

FYI, Dave Cramer is working on all the generated content's
side. The page notion itself is contained in a CSS module that is
far too old. There are many reasons for that, often quite
bad. And I'm not even sure our notion of page contained there is
not obsolete, deriving from concepts that are almost twenty years
old. I repeat: obsolete. The model in CSS Paged Media is in my
opinion something that is to what we really need what was CSS 1
to the current Web pages we browse on a daily basis; a good beginning
but a too limited one for 2015. I choke every time I see the 16
margin boxes specified in CSS Paged Media and the associated magic...

There is some resistance to changes there, again often for quite
bad reasons. With other concepts like Templates, Regions, Shapes
and Exclusions we could certainly specify much more powerful - and even
simpler - page models. We need implementors for that, and that's where
you all can help. The CSS WG is where it should happen.

I'd like to add one bit about pagination and in particular transitions
between pages: I said it multiple times in CSS WG meetings and W3C
TPAC, we really need a spec there. I recommend you read the thread
starting at [1] if you have not seen it before.

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Jun/0291.html

</Daniel>
--
W3C CSS Working Group, Co-chair

Received on Wednesday, 5 August 2015 18:41:08 UTC