Re: css layout should be symmetrical

Ian wrote:

> So please people. Go out and use the table display types in HTML.
> There is nothing wrong with doing so. What is wrong is using the
> HTML table elements for non-tabular data, an all-too-common
> technique.

I have used them in one of my pages. It is a really good idea, because
modern browsers can do tables very well, so if you can structure your
markup properly and "embed" it in tables through CSS you really have a
very good solution. The problem is, you can't always do this, since
the layout of the table depends entirely on the order that the
elements appear in the markup. So for example this wouldn't be
possible AFAIK:

<div class="main section">
<div class="middle column"> [...] </div>
<div class="left column"> [...] </div>
<div class="right column"> [...] </div>
<div>

where:

.section { display : table-row  }
.column  { display : table-cell }

since middle column would appear to the left of the left column.

Would it be feasible to add a col-order and a row-order properties,
or some other wiser mechanism to account for this? So we could add
something like this to the above example:

.left   { col-order : 1 }
.middle { col-order : 2 }
.right  { col-order : 3 }

I don't find other positioning schemes very suited for many things
that authors want to do on media="screen" (which many consider to be
in fact a hypothetical media="window",) but to me this table layout
system is powerful, specially when combined with the overflow
property.

-- 
Best regards,
Juan R. Pozo - jrpozo@conclase.net
http://html.conclase.net/

Received on Sunday, 7 April 2002 13:29:39 UTC