VALIGN Equivalent?

Have I overlooked an equivalent to the VALIGN property found in HTML tables 
and table cells?

If it doesn't exist, I think it is a useful concept.  For example, it would 
allow authors to complete center a set of elements within its parent.  I 
have not found a way to do this in the existing implementation.  Top and 
Bottom can be achieved by enclosing the material in a div that has a top or 
bottom equal to 0.  To mean this seems like a hack, but it should work.

The primary use of this would be to align related material in adjacent 
boxes, such as a caption next to a vertically large media object.

Specifically, this is what I would like to see:
A box property that has three possible values: 'top', 'center', and 
'bottom', with 'top' as the default.  It would determine the vertical 
position of inline elements contained within the box in the following ways:
	top: Aligns the top margin of the first line box to the top padding of the 
box.
	center: Aligns the vertical center of the collection of all line boxes and 
floating elements to the center-point between the top padding and bottom 
paddings of the box.
	bottom: Aligns the bottom margin of the last line box to the bottom 
padding of the box.

The specific details may not be correct, since I am a little confused about 
how paddings and margins interact (do they collapse? What is the design 
decision for why/why not?).

Andrew n marshall
  student - artist - programmer
    http://www.media-electronica.com/anm-bin/anm
      "Everyone a mentor,  Everyone a pupil"

Received on Wednesday, 26 November 1997 17:34:55 UTC