- From: Scott E. Preece <preece@predator.urbana.mcd.mot.com>
- Date: Tue, 2 Jul 1996 15:57:33 -0500
- To: cpj1@winternet.com
- Cc: papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, reddik@thegroup.net, www-style@w3.org
From: Chris Josephes <cpj1@winternet.com> | | The big thing about SPACE that was already pointed out was that it only | support measurements in PIXELS. Thus, Emily Dickenson's greatest works | would only have been truely presentable on a seventy-two dot per inch | screen with allignment controled by SPACER and MULTICOL. (Luckily, she | stuck to pen and paper). --- Well, assuming a pixel is going to be a fixed size on a given device, you can still assure some kinds of relationships between positions. It gives the author a more convenient way to do the kind of quadding you do now with empty images, without having to pre-generate all the sizes of image you need. I don't know why they didn't support units other than pixels... When you combine this with the new ability to specify attribute values as JavaScript expressions, you *almost* have enough to do really powerful layout control, but JavaScript doesn't seem to offer you the kind of device-description capabilities you would need (for instance, a rendered-width() method on strings, to determine how many pixels you need to offset to match the length of a given string or a resolution() methtod on windows). --- | Stylesheets are more flexible because they were designed for true device | independence. Work is still in progress over such things as text flow | around images, scaling, output formatting, but the stylesheet work is far | superior than anything put out by NS lately. --- I love stylesheets; I wish they had them in Netscape today. I also understand how it might be a major engineering job to re-work things so they fit. But even if they did faithfully implement CSS1 today, that still wouldn't provide the functionality of MULTICOL and would only partially address the goals of SPACER. scott --- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550 internet mail: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com
Received on Tuesday, 2 July 1996 16:55:56 UTC