Re: "inline" elements in CSS2 box model, and "inline-block" in CSS3

From: Vadim Plessky <lucy-ples@mtu-net.ru>
Subject: Re: "inline" elements in CSS2 box model, and "inline-block" in CSS3
Date: Wed, Oct 17, 2001, 7:26 PM

> On Wednesday 17 October 2001 11:28, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> |   * Vadim Plessky wrote:
> |   >Therefor, I would like to propose to include (*backport* from CSS3) {
> |   >display: inline-block; } in CSS2 specifications.
> |   >It should speedup adoption of "inline-block" by 2-4 years, as
> |   > manufacturers of mainstream browsers, realistically speaking,
> |   >can add support for it within 1 year.
> |
> |   Why does this property need to be defined in CSS Level 2 in order to be
> |   supported? Adding new features through errata is in general not a good
> |   idea.
>
> As it's pretty well known, there is none browser on our planet
> supporting CSS1. (I mean, *all* of CSS1, without any bugs)

You could just shorten that statement to:

 "there is none[sic] browser on our planet without any bugs"

So I don't really see your point.

> And CSS1 was introduced ...yehh, in 1996.

And IE5/Mac supported all of CSS1 ... in March of 2000 (over 1.5 yrs ago).

> So it seems none will support [all] CSS2 until early 2005 or late 2004...

Why should any browser support all of CSS2, when portions of CSS2 itself are
still broken?  I don't think any browser will ever support "all of CSS2".

> I have no idea on Microsoft position on this, though.

Well, since it wasn't obvious:

a. we publicly introduced 'inline-block' over two years ago
   in the 16 Sep 1999 UI for CSS WD:

 http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#display

b. we implemented display:inline-block in IE5/Mac and IE6/Windows.

> BTW: this construction, "inline-block", is quite important for correct
> layouting.

Strongly agreed.

> Current CSS2 layout definition for "vertical" block placement is badly
> defined and misleading.

Well, I'm not sure if I would make that strong a statement.

But I will say that it is "insufficient" - for example, for _easily_
achieving vertically centering effects without relying on position:fixed and
display:table-cell hackery.

> Adding "inline-block" will clarify this (a little bit :-) and make  confusion
> smaller.

Agreed.

> In particular, HTML export filter from word processors should benefit greatly
> from writing blocks as "inline-block", instead of writing unnecessary tables.

Agreed.

However, I don't think this should be a change to CSS2, as it is very much
an addition.

Should, however, there be a CSS2.1 (which removed the bad/unimplemented
bits, and added a few simple improvements), I would be in favor of adding
"display:inline-block".

Regards,

Tantek

...........................................................................
Tantek Çelik                                          tantekc@microsoft.com
W3C CSS wg representative, HTML wg alternate rep     tantek@cs.stanford.edu
Tasman Development                                    Microsoft Corporation

Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2001 18:51:49 UTC