RE: css layout should be symmetrical

-----Original Message-----
From: Christian Wolfgang Hujer [mailto:Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 3:23 AM
To: Hoyt, Phil; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: css layout should be symmetrical

>> That's to say that, for example, it should be possible to have <th>s at
>> top, left, right and bottom of a table - or at least two dimensions
>> simultaneously. I just finished making a table that had a row at the top
>> and a column at the left that were both structurally headers, and I'm
sure
>> I'm not alone. Colgroups are not the same thing - more like a parallel of
>> tbody.
> What's the point? I think I won't understand this until you show me a
source 
> code example.

The point seems obvious to me: html is structural markup and if something is
a heading to me then I want to call it a header. Something like the
following seems quite useful:
<table>
	<thead>
		<rowheading></rowheading><colgroup></colgroup>
	<thead>
		<th>name of the month</th>
		<th>number of days in a month</th>
	</thead>
	<tr>
		<rh>January</rh>
		<td>31</td>
	</tr>
	<tr>
		<rh>February</rh>
		<td>28 or 29</td>
	...

This is just to demonstrate how a person would want to be able to have a
table heading somewhere other than the top of the table. The invented tags
are for illustration 

>> Similarly, it should be as easy (and also take a parallel or identical
set
>> of commands) to centre a block horizontally as vertically. I think it was
>> pointed out in the "How is it possible to devise such a feeble system"
>> thread that this is not currently the case.
> Using a table with width and height properties and cells with text-align
and 
>vertical-align properties this can already be done, though this will be 
> improved in CSS Level 3 as far as I read the working drafts.

I'm inclined to agree with Jesse that this is misuse of table layout. Why
not do: 
<div style="margin: auto">centre this div both horizontally and
vertically</div>

As far as I can tell, the only thing preventing the easy centering of a div
vertically is the fact that css doesn't know how high the window is. Css
does, however know how wide the window is. 

> The following properties in CSS Level 2 take care of this:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#direction
> direction and unicode-bidi.

> How inline elements line up depends of the direction property of their 
container.

So why not add the ability to set block-direction as well. It seems just
about as useful to me to make a page the scrolls horizontally as to make one
that scrolls vertically especially if you take into account text that wraps
vertically.

Received on Monday, 18 February 2002 10:30:24 UTC