- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2003 10:33:58 -0700
- To: www-style@w3.org
On Monday 2003-07-21 18:00 +0100, Afternoon wrote: > I firmly agree with this. It goes back to the discussion last week. > There is no other way to achieve this effect in CSS except through the > table syntax. The effect is very useful. It seems to me that if you want that effect, the concept you're describing is tabular layout, not floats. The use of floats to create things that look like tabular layout is fragile, and would become considerably more fragile if this proposal were accepted. After all, floats weren't designed for this type of thing -- they were designed for the idea of taking something out of the flow so that text would wrap around it. To see why layouts using floats would become more fragile, consider what happens when you resize the window while looking at the following testcase: http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/css/box/float/008.html in IE for Windows, to a width just larger than the width that allows one float to fit on the page without wrapping. Windows IE puts a second float next to the first, and makes it very tall. This would mean authors have a great way to create pages that look like they work fine, but in reality break very badly at certain window widths. This is a bad thing. If you want to be able to do tabular layouts using CSS, it would make much more sense to encourage browser makers to support the table display types than to make floats even stranger than they already are. -David -- L. David Baron <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
Received on Monday, 21 July 2003 13:36:42 UTC