Static positioned block to define origin for abs positioned children?

According to the CSS Positioning draft, absolutely positioned elements
should be positioned relative to the innermost enclosing absolutely
positioned block. It is NOT possible the have a statically positioned block
define origin for its child elements.

This is in my opinion a very unfortunate limitation. It makes it impossible
to have a group of absolutely positioned elements (such as a short section
of text with 2 columns layout) "embedded" in the general flow of text.

To achieve these and similar effects, one is forced to make "all" elements
absolutely positioned, which in turn makes it neccesary to move elements
around to make room for other elements (as they grow bigger). Also, having
all elements be absolutely positioned in this way, one is more or less
forced to specify fixed font sizes to ensure elements won't overlap due to
the user's stylesheet (or browser font settings).

I'd suggest we introduce an additional property for block level elements:

origin: parent | this
(default value is parent)

"parent" leaves it to the parent block to define origin for absolutely
positioned child elements (the parent may in its turn leave the decision to
its parent and so on) and "this" defines origin for child abs. positioned
elements to be the upper left corner to the block having the "origin"
property.

What do you think? I don't think css positioning will be able to fully
replace the use of tables unless this (or a similar) addition is made to the
css positioning spec.

If you're interested, I'll provide some example code to clarify what kind of
effects I want to produce.

Regards,

Jonas Salling

Received on Thursday, 30 October 1997 09:59:35 UTC