problem with css-positioning

I'm still a newbie in the style forum, so please understand in advance.

It seems to me that it has been the will of the structuralist school of web
design to stop using the TABLE element for formatting page layout. They
advocate using stylesheets to do this instead. But there are still some
serious gaps in stylesheet implementations, and maybe even in the spec
itself, which prevent this alternative from being plausible.

I came up with an idea while reading section 9.1 of the CSS Level 2
specification. It states:
"The height of the initial containing block may be specified with the
'height' property for the root element. If this property has the value
'auto', the containing block height will grow to accommodate the document's
content. "
I think it would be quite useful to designers, increase the popularity of
CSS positioning, and promote better-structured HTML documents, if setting
the 'height' property for the root element to 'window' sets that to be the
root element to be the height of the window. The height of the root element
would /not/ increase with the height of the document, but it would be
scrolled using the overflow property. Same for width. For example:

body { height: window; width: window }
.navigation { position: absolute; left: 0px; width: 180px; top: 0px }
.content { position: absolute; left: 185px; right: 5px; width: auto; top:
30px; bottom: 20px; height: auto }

Now, I know that the www-html forum never likes a new idea, but I think this
is a good idea, and a good thing for stylesheets, and I firmly believe it
would be good to see it come along, even if it takes a few years to design
and implement the idea.

What do the style experts of this forum think?

Daniel

Received on Wednesday, 1 August 2001 17:08:11 UTC