- From: Jens Meiert <jens.meiert@erde3.com>
- Date: Thu, 2 Dec 2004 10:55:07 +0100 (MET)
- To: mike stevens <mikesteven@gmail.com>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Example 1:
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
> A B C
> D
Usually you could create two paragraphs with four span elements each
(including the corresponding text parts) and then use the CSS snippet "p {
display: table-row; }" and "span { display: table-cell; }". Unfortunately,
this doesn't work in certain major user-agents.
Alternatively, you can use one paragraph which includes all the eight span
elements and then float all these: "p span { float: left; width: 7em; }" --
but don't forget to donate the fifth span element a "clear: left;". Its flaw
is that the text in the first row, your sample sentence, will look
"interrupted", which you can in turn try to avoid by giving visually
associated span elements individual width assignments.
> Example 2:
> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
> Aenean mi metus, rutrum sed, interdum id, convallis in, mi.
> Quisque luctus accumsan lorem. Suspendisse pellentesque.
> Line Donec lacus nulla, blandit scelerisque, consequat vitae, sollicitudin
> 5 vel, lacus. [...]
The basic problem I see here is text scaling, so all usual attempts (the
table approach, too) will fail when text is scaled -- so a block originally
representing five rows of text will then display four or six rows, for
example. This seems to be the weak point in all currently practicable
solutions (CSS counters [1] /might/ be a future option, but I didn't reflect
this so far).
Nonetheless: The CSS specification has a nice "change bars" example [2]
which roughly goes in this direction. IMHO you /should/ hide the line number
by e.g. using background images since line numbers don't seem to represent
an important information, and be aware of the general problem mentioned
above.
Hope that helps anyway,
Jens.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#counter
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#q28
--
Jens Meiert
Interface Architect (IxD)
http://meiert.com/
Received on Thursday, 2 December 2004 09:55:40 UTC