Re: Border Styles

No, I didn't mean to merge border and underline properties. It may
have looked a bit like that, because in some cases three sides of the
border may disappear. These are the cases where there is a paragraph
break after an element, but not before. An example is the DD element,
which may very well start on the same line as the DT (without a break
in between), but which will force a break after the DD element.

In such an element, the left, right and top borders cannot be drawn,
since their position is unknown. Although on second thought, maybe the
right border *can* (and should) be drawn. (Otherwise it would be
impossible to put a frame around a DT/DD combination.)



Talking about underlines:

The underline property can maybe be generalized a bit to include other
types of lines as well, like the 3D border used by Arena. Note that
this again looks like a border, but it isn't. Firstly, it will
continue on the next line at a line break, secondly, there is no way
to put space between the decoration and the text. A possible syntax
is:

  text.decoration = none | underline | box | raisedbox | shadowbox

These decorations will have to be mutually exclusive (since the
positions of the lines are fixed), even if that means that you can't
put underlined text in a raisedbox. Note that Arena currently messes
things up. Try

    <u>This is underlined <a href="test">with an anchor</a> in
    between.</u>
or
    <a href="test">This is an <u>underlined</u> anchor.</a>




About the different border styles for the different sides:

We can cut back on the number of properties if we only allow the line
width to vary and not the style. A nice compact notation would be to
allow from 1 to 4 dimensions on the border.width property:

  border.width = top [ right [ bottom [ left ] ] ]

If there is only one number, that number applies to all sides,
otherwise missing widths are taken from the opposite side. (Credit for
this idea goes to Hakon, not to me.)

Like Benjamin suggested earlier, in addition to numbers, the keywords
`narrow', `medium' and `wide' are allowed as well (and recommended,
especially in cascaded style sheet, in order to keep some consistency
in border widths).



Bert

-- 
                          Bert Bos                      Alfa-informatica
                 <bert@let.rug.nl>           Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
    <http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/>     Postbus 716, NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN

Received on Monday, 17 July 1995 11:43:52 UTC