Re: Notes from a component model pow-wow

On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 7:47 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> A comment on use cases that was brought up over here.
>
> There's a use case that is not addressed by XBL1 and impossible to quite
> address in a JS library that goes as follows.  Say you have some data in a
> <table>.  Semantically it's a data table.  But you may want to present it as
> a graphic (SVG or canvas).
>
> XBL1 will let you construct a block or inline box for the <table> and then
> stick a shadow tree containing just an <svg> or <canvas> inside. But it
> would be nicer if that wrapper block/inline box were not there and if the
> box that were created were just the <svg> or <canvas> box...  So
> effectively, treating the element the component is attached to as a
> <content> element in terms of box tree construction.
>
> Is this a use case we want to address?

I think this is properly a CSS issue.  You want an element to not
exist in the box tree, but to still have its children in the tree,
which should be controllable with a display value, perhaps called
'transparent'.  It's a more complex version of display:none.

This sort of functionality would be useful outside of this specific
use-case as well.  For example, it seems that the most natural and
easy way to handle the <details> element is to produce a shadow
wrapper around its non-<summary> contents.  That way, one can do a
simple "details:not(:open) > magic-wrapper { display: none; }".  But
you don't want this wrapper to show up and interfere with styling when
the <details> is open.  display:transparent would help here.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 21 September 2011 03:16:46 UTC