Re: CSS Positioning Draft

On Jan 31,  1:46pm, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:

> From a quick look at the draft, i see that all the elements
> may be positioned relative to the top-left corner of the
> parent, but not to the bottom or right.  What if one wants
> to place an element (say, a menu) exactly two inches wide
> along the right edge of the window?  Let me know if i've
> missed something, but i don't see how the draft allows this.

Good point. Without adding constant expressions (100%-2in) it
seems that syntax to select the reference point could be needed.

> The most obvious solution is to allow "right" and "bottom"
> properties, since you've already separated "width" and
> "height" from "top" and "left".  I think it's reasonable
> to ask people not to put these values in conflict.

And if a conflict does occur, how should it be resolved? I tend to
shy away from specs that say "if you do this, what happens is a
surprise not described here" ;-)


> You also might want to include a few more display-independent
> length units (like cm or %) in your examples rather than
> focusing on pixel counts only.  With a little care even
> documents with positioning specs should be able to tolerate
> some window resizing.

I agree that tolerance to different window sizes and to window
resizing is an important part of accessible document design, and
the examples currently do not showcase this aspect. Often, the
first thing I do on seeing a complex layout is to try very wide
and very narrow windows, see if it breaks.

Do you have any suggestions for well-designed examples that would
demonstrate such a resilience to resizing?

Thanks for your valuable and timely comments.


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 31 January 1997 14:29:14 UTC