Re: CSS: %% length unit. Proposal. Some clarifications.

On Saturday 2004-05-08 21:30 -0400, Ernest Cline wrote:
> > [Original Message]
> > From: Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com>
> >
> > %% units should be allowed ONLY in margin and width/height
> > CSS attributes for boxes having 'normal' flow.
> > Not in absolute nor relative nor fixed positioning mode.
> 
> Then I absolutely, categorically am against %%.  Both from the

I am also against it.  It is an attempt to mix into inline layout things
that are conceptually unrelated to inline layout.  If you want a bunch
of things to share the horizontal space across a region, you should
describe that rather than using a line-breaking model and then saying
that one element takes x% of the rest of the available space in the
line.

Implementing this would significantly complicate line breaking.
Currently implementations can assume that elements don't change size
when moved from one line to another, except for pieces that appear (soft
hyphens) or disappear (trailing spaces) *at break points*.  This would
violate that assumption and add significant complexity to something
that's already complex enough.

The realistic use cases I've seen mentioned for this %% proposal would
be handled by a flexible box model (like XUL's box model).

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >