Re: a "clear: smart" feature in CSS?

At 8:24p -0500 09/05/97, Rob wrote:
 > A common problem when laying out pages:
 >
 >  <img src="relatively-large.gif" align=left>
 >  <p>This is a long paragraph describing stuff blah blah blah...
 >  (ok, it's not that long but pretent it is for the sake of argument)
 >  </p>
 >
 > On browsers with even medium-sized windows, it looks fine. The image

Just out of curiosity, what is your concept of "medium-sized"? :)

 > is on the left and on the right is the text.
 >
 > But when the window is smaller (say using frames on a lower-
 > resolution screen) the paragraph is still on the right side of the
 > image, but only one word per line, which looks pretty ugly.

 > A better solution would be a "clear: smart-right" (or smart-left
 > etc.) attribute in CSS.  If there's plenty of room for text or
 > images on the right hand side, it won't clear. If there's not enough
 > room (text cannot be rendered with more than two words per line: I
 > can't think of a good general formula for this at the moment) that
 > it would clear. A browser or renderer that doesn't have the
 > 'smart's would clear for all instances rather than risk ugly
 > output.

Sounds good to me. I think it should allow specifying minimum em's or
something, though I don't know offhand what a good syntax would be.
Maybe IMG.smart { side-min: 10em } ?

__________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo_at_best*com>    Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter

Received on Saturday, 6 September 1997 02:34:07 UTC