Re: complexity (was: Re: XHTML and RDF)

On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Orion Adrian wrote:
>
> * Certain properties should be properties of the parent and not the
> child like positioning. If I want to transfer something to another
> document I can't because I can no longer control where it goes.

Could you explain what you mean? (Maybe with an example?) I'm not sure why
(or how) positioning should be on the parent element.


> * For lengths based on px, pt, em and ex I can't add values of different
> types. Here's an example scenerio:
>
> I have a three column layout.  The left and right columns have borders
> that are 1px and content widths of 20em and outside margins of 2em. I'd
> like to be able to specify that the left and right positions of the
> center columns are 22em+2px.

The working group has looked at the idea of expressions in the past. I'll
look into it again.


> * Currently I'm stuck with making everything the same unit.
>
> * It seems impossible to properly add units of em and ex since they're
> based on the box's font size and not the page's font size.
>
> * Is there not a reason that CSS doesn't just use a body-level font-size
> and make elements specify font-sizes as percentages of the body font
> size. That would fix all the problems with adding em and ex together
> outside of the inability to add non-like units together. It would also
> have the side effect of making a simpler implementation.

These three points are being solved in CSS3 with the 'rem' unit, the 'root
em'. It is a user-preference-dependent unit, 1rem being equal to the
user's preferred font size for body text, which is uniformly the same
across the page.


> * For the sake of everyone, get rid of "text-decoration: blink"
>
> * float shouldn't exist. It should be a combination of properties
> (position and a new property that specifies to cut out the area the box
> occupies from boxes inside it forcing flow around it.

Since both were in CSS1 there is little chance of them being removed now.


For the other issues (quoted below) I don't disagree, I just don't have a
better solution. If anyone has any ideas, it would be great to suggest
them so the working group can study them and maybe put them in a CSS3
draft.

> * The various values for "display: table*" seem to be a kludge solution.

> * Things I can do very simply in Word with tabs seem to be lost. If I
> want three peices of text, one left aligned, one center-aligned and one
> right aligned, it's very difficult to do and pretty much requires me to
> rely on one of the "display:table*" values, which don't particularly
> play nice with certain structures.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
U+1047E                                         /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Tuesday, 13 April 2004 08:12:13 UTC