Re: inline vs inline-block

> On Feb 9, 2018, at 2:55 AM, Philip Fennell <Philip.Fennell@marklogic.com> wrote:
> 
> > I don't know if the default should be inline-block though. In fact,
> > I don't know if any default is useful in practice, as you usually
> > want to layout a form in a very specific way and no default is likely
> > to be acceptable.
>  
> +1

A well chosen default is useful in at least two ways:

- When teaching classes in XForms (as in anything else), the quicker
one can get something to the stage of looking Not Hopelessly Ugly,
the better.

A default that makes a form look the way we will want it to look after
a few days' or weeks’ honing its appearance — that doesn’t exist.  But
a default that makes a beginner’s form look like something they can
imagine improving is good, and a default that makes a beginner’s form 
look like something out of a nightmare is less good.

XMetal had a really nice algorithm for guessing which elements in 
an unknown XML vocabulary for which it  had no CSS rules should
be blocks and which should be phrase-level elements. The result was
that it was easy to go from zero to something you could at least read
comfortably in a couple minutes.

If it can be done without backward compatibility nightmares, it might
be worth while looking up that algorithm and using a variant of it.

- When developing a form for deployment, either you supply CSS
rules for every element, class, and context that could conceivably 
matter, or you supply CSS rules for elements that don’t currently
look right and for which the default needs to be overridden.

The first approach is surely more bullet-proof, but I don’t think I’ve
ever met anyone who didn’t take the second approach.


There is only one case I can remember where after experience using
a technology I thought not only that the default chosen was wrong,
but that it would have been better not to have a default, so that every
single user had to specify a behavior every single time.  Even a wrong
default is almost always better than no default.



>  
> From: <ebruchez@gmail.com> on behalf of Erik Bruchez <ebruchez@orbeon.com>
> Date: Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 19:13
> To: Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl>
> Cc: XForms <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: inline vs inline-block
> Resent-From: <public-xformsusers@w3.org>
> Resent-Date: Thursday, 8 February 2018 at 19:13
>  
> I suspect that when XForms 1.0 came out, inline-block was not quite a thing yet. For example [1] Firefox 2 from late 2006 had this behind a flag.
>  
> I don't know if the default should be inline-block though. In fact, I don't know if any default is useful in practice, as you usually want to layout a form in a very specific way and no default is likely to be acceptable.
>  
> -Erik
>  
> [1] https://caniuse.com/#feat=inline-block
>  
> On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 2:50 AM, Steven Pemberton <steven.pemberton@cwi.nl> wrote:
>> Throughout the spec we distinguish between block and inline display.
>> 
>> For instance: "Unless otherwise specified, controls have an inline layout by default (e.g. for a host language that supports CSS, the default styling should be display:inline)."
>> 
>> However, if I ever explicitly set a display property in the CSS to inline, it almost always to display: inline-block, principally because you can set height and width.
>> 
>> Should be specify this?
>> 
>> Steven
>> 

********************************************
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
Black Mesa Technologies LLC
cmsmcq@blackmesatech.com
http://www.blackmesatech.com
********************************************

Received on Friday, 9 February 2018 16:34:02 UTC