Re: [CSS3] Content to appear twice

Ian Hickson wrote:

> How would you cope with the following case?:
> 
>    <applet src="some-plugin" id="foo"/>
>    <div/>
>    <div/>
> 
> ...with:
> 
>    div { duplicate-the-element-here: 'foo'; }
> 
> ...? 

I don't know. Should I? :-) As far as i can focus on the problem as a 
not-programmer and a just-web-author there are 3 possibilities:

1 showing one applet twice (or thrice) (the Browser could simply "copy"
   the "look" of the "area". Reaction on Input is shown thrice.)
2 having the applet thrice on the page (just as if it was 3 times in the
   HTML-Source)
3 saying "this only works for ul, p, div,..." in the specs and waiting
   for ideas to appear later.

> It also seems odd from a DOM point of view -- what's the offsetTop of a
> <div> that is painted twice?

My Idea was to have an "original" and a "copy". Of course those things 
have to deal with the original. Sorry, but i don't know DOM good enough 
to understand the problem.

> Yeah, that can be a problem... you could include the header twice 
[...]
> and define the header outside the markup. 

That's what i don't want to. Things like the Naviation belong to the 
HTML-Code. This works with all UAs. Solutions that are not compatible 
with former standards (or Web Culture) are not acceptable for me as author.

 > That may be semantically better anyway, since the
> document navigation is not necessarily a part of the document itself in
> many cases.

In some. Maybe. But showing "where am i" and "where can i go" is an 
essential part of web documents and other techniques are not commonly 
supported. Copying with CSS could enhance diplaying on supporting 
browsers (and only on the media where it makes sense) while not 
affecting older browsers and other media.

Spoken from an authors point of view: Display-Property allows to display 
elements 0 times and 1 time. Why not 2 times, 3 times,...?

Matthias

Received on Thursday, 4 December 2003 06:04:45 UTC