[CSS3-page]: Comments on pages media

Hi,

These are some comments on the recent draft.

1) Printable and non-printable areas

The size of the non-printable area is user agent defined. In some cases this
will cause text to really stick to the edge of the paper. It does in any
case make the page layout less portable.

I think that the margin boxes should not be in the page margin. The margin
boxes should be region boxes and what is now the page-area should be the
body region. The page-area would then contain all the regions and the margins
would be around it.

2) Media Queries

I'm not sure if expressing page layout in terms of a conditional page size
has so much added value. I assume this is for page sizes which are set from
outside by the user agent. One can cope with that using relative values. The
cases where this is not good enough are, in my opinion, locale related.
Wouldn't it therefore be more useful to combine this with the pseudo class
:lang for @page rules?

3) Margin at-rules

It is not clear to me which are the properties that apply to these rules. The
examples seem to suggest that only the content property is allowed. This is
confirmed by the way the margin box sizes are determined. As I understand it
this is driven by the actual content of the boxes. This is a bottom-up approach.
Wouldn't it be useful to also provide top-down constraints such as the width
for top-boxes? How else can one deal with situations where the pieces of text
are somewhat longer and might overlap?

4) Populating margin boxes

The string-set property, combined with the page-policy, can be used to
provide content for the margin boxes coming from the document itself. The
content function, which is available in the string-set property, is however
not specified. My understanding is that it can capture text from within an
element. This is not enough for the margin boxes, because then it is
impossible to say how this text should layed out in the margin boxes. It is
also not an option to take over the properties that apply to the text which
was captured, because very often the style is different in the running headers
and footers from the style in the document itself.

I propose to introduce the formatted-set property. It could be applied to any
element. The effect would be that it would be set with the formatted result
of that element, even if its display type is "none", which would be the case
in practice if the destination is a margin box. In the latter case the element
would not be visible in the document flow, but would contribute to formatting
elsewhere. The "formatted" function would produce the formatted result, just
like the string function produces the captured string. In this proposal the
string-set property and string function would remain very useful to populate
these special elements.

Regards,

Werner.
-- 
Werner Donné  --  Re BVBA
Engelbeekstraat 8
B-3300 Tienen
tel: (+32) 486 425803	e-mail: werner.donne@re.be

Received on Thursday, 25 September 2003 06:14:03 UTC