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

For me personally the concept of "auto" is one of the most confusing things
in CSS:
Bad dream of implementor: "...'auto' replaced by some suitable value, but
there are exceptions...".

E.g. why margin-left/right:auto in some cases is exactly 50%% and
margin-top/bottom:auto is nothing in most(or in all?) cases?

%% is an attempt to formalize this 'auto' concept if you wish.

width:50%  and width:50%%  are basicly the same entities
but in first place ContainerContentWidth is used as base for computing
percents and
in second place it is FreeSpace which is function of ContainerContentWidth.

Andrew Fedoniouk.
http://terrainformatica.com


L. David Baron  wrote:
"This means that, while it's a value for the 'width' property, it's not
actually describing the width, but rather a factor to be added to an
'auto' width.  That seems confusing, and might lead authors to expect
that of 'width' in other cases as well (as some buggy browsers already
do, especially for 'height')"

> first:
>    compute everything as %% does not exist at all.
>    apply all paragraph wrapping rules as usual.
> second:
>    compute free space for each line box which we've got on first step.
>    compute all elements which have %% according to free space.
>    replace elements in line boxes.

Received on Tuesday, 11 May 2004 17:57:50 UTC