- From: Todd Fahrner <fahrner@pobox.com>
- Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 00:00:29 -0700
- To: "David Perrell" <davidp@earthlink.net>, <www-style@w3.org>
- Cc: <howcome@w3.org>
At 18:24 -0700 6.3.97, David Perrell wrote: > I agree that would be a more useful interpretation, but it doesn't jive > with the spec as I read it. As long as we're still in the realm of interpretation, and in the absence of any implementations setting precedent, does it not make sense to promote the most useful interpretation rather than propose outright amendments to the recommendation ('cept for fixing up some obviously erroneous ascii-art)? - I mean, alignment is just style, not content, right? ;^) > The above interpretation requires an > implicit floated :list-marker (or :before) pseudo-element and a > positive margin on LI. Seems to me that a floated list-marker is implied any way you slice it: the list-item content is typically rendered as a block, where the first (non-generated) character aligns with the first of wrapped lines beneath - not the same as an "inline" hanging indent effect. So the marker is floated. > The "outside" example above would require the > list-marker to have a negative left margin equal to the positive left > margin of LI. And to accommodate NSN's treatment of ordered lists (with > numbers flush right in a column), the list-marker pseudo-elements would > need a fixed width equal to the margin. I'm beginning to grasp the difficulties for narrow margins and long list markers. As with other "float" instances, I would think it appropriate to wrap the list-item content around the marker, or alternatively to shift to "inside" style if the margin were too narrow to allow about .5em separation between marker and block. Let me get this straight: in your interpretation of the spec, in the case of a list item with every available white-space property set to 0 (with no inherited margin), and the list-style set to "outside", there should still be a phantom left-margin on the list-item block, and the marker would touch the canvas edge? In the case of ordered lists, as the marker width changed for extra characters, the phantom margin would change as well? How much phantom-margin is sufficient to deal with arbitrarily wide markers; e.g., in the case of an ordered list that went from I-XVIII? It would really help to get an authoritative clarification of the expected behavior(s) here. Lists are obviously quite an important HTML construct. If their formatting cannot be regimented visually with blockquotes and indents of other sorts in a document with CSS, the temptation to rely on tables and spacer GIFs looms large. Has there been any discussion or detailed specification on how lists (or normal block-level elements) should be rendered when their display type is set to "inline"? ________________________________________ Todd Fahrner mailto:fahrner@pobox.com http://www.verso.com/ The printed page transcends space and time. The printed page, the infinitude of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY. --El Lissitzky, 1923
Received on Wednesday, 4 June 1997 02:50:44 UTC