RE: boxes borders & bounding binding

> [Original Message]
> From: Wingnut <wingnut@winternet.com>
> To: <www-style@w3.org>
> Date: 11/25/2003 9:01:12 AM
> Subject: boxes borders & bounding binding 
>
>
> This will be my last attempt to get this message to www-style.
> Two earlier attempts seemed to go, returned good w3 mailserver queue 
> numbers, and just didn't show up on the list.  Am I being gagged?
> -- 
>
> Briefly and disjointed... isn't 'inset' a border style, and not really
> to be used as a positioner?  Not sure if it was being used like that in
> Ernest's example [1] ... just checking.  According to [2], inset and
> outset are... like all borders... space-eating coloring schemes.  And an
> outset becomes an inset by flipping your monitor upside down.

My proposal had nothing to do with border-style: inset, but was intended
to provide a way for indicating how far "inset" from the outer border edge
the box border edge was to be.  Given the potention for confustion, my
proposed properties should probably be renamed if adopted.
Perhaps "border-offset" would be a better choice.  This is not the first
change I have made to this proposal.  I already in a followup post [3]
to my initial post on this subject [1] came to the conclusion that my
proposal should be simplified to apply only when box-sizing is
border-box.  Further reflection causes me to believe that what is really
needed is not another property, but the ability to do some simple math
in CSS.

Rather than:

box-sizing: border-box;
border-width: thick;
border-offset: 75%;
width: 25em;

something like:

box-sizing: border-box;
border-width:thick;
width: 25em - 1.5thick;

would serve, and there are other cases where simple addition and
subtraction would be useful. (Yes, I know that I am in effect turning
thin, medium, and thick into three additional units of measure by this
proposal, but that doesn't bother me much.) While this does lose the
ability to do some complicated border offsets, finding a use case for
those offsets seems very problematic at the current time.

> Line-height gets involved in these discussions too, does it not?  I
> lightly perused the css3 wd... and I can't find much info on the subject.

Line height is in the CSS3 line module [4].

> With all this corner-imaging paint-your-own-border stuff, and the
> seeming need for line-height to firmly butt-into padding, and padding to
> firmly butt-into margin... border is starting to look like an element of
> its own.  Its starting to have its own CONTENT.
>
> Long ago in some w3c forum, I used a "graded school paper" as an
> example of border-like things... actually being CONTENT.  The teacher
> draws arrows, and makes notes in margins, and circles words and
> numbers... and returns the paper to the student.  Those "doodles" ARE
> CONTENT, and they can be styled.

Depends.  If the meaning wouldn't change if the border like things aren't
there then it's styling.  If it would change, it's content. It's like
color:red;
in a accounting context it indicates a negative number, and is content
related. in some other contexts it might be used to indicate emphasis,
and in still others it might be used to just look pretty.  In the first two
cases
tho, the content could be conveyed by <span class="neg"> or <em>
and then the red color would be added by using style rules.

> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Oct/0291.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-border-20021107/borderstyles.png

[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2003Oct/0306.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-linebox-20020515

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 10:54:10 UTC