Re: Rendering order without positioning

Orion Adrian <oadrian@hotmail.com> wrote:

> Has anyone considered a transformation module for CSS that doesn't use 
> CSS, but rather something a little more XSLT-like.  This would include
> positioning and boxing and transformation.

Have you looked at XSL-FO? This was one approach along these lines, 
albeit one that has not proved popular or well-supported on the web.

Personally I would have liked to see a grid-based CSS layout scheme so 
that CSS could reproduce everything that tables were capable of doing 
(and more); this could solve liorean's requirements and yours, as well 
as doing away with absolute positioning (which many authors seem to find 
tricky), without defeating progressive rendering or raising the 
possibility of recursive definitions.

For example, by giving an ancestor 'display: grid', any descendants with 
'position: grid' could be taken out of normal flow and positioned using 
integer values for left/top/right/bottom that correspond to horizontal 
and vertical grid lines inside the ancestor. The number and spacing of 
such lines would be dictated by the highest l/t/r/b numbers in 
'position: grid' descendants and their width/height sizes (with any 
fixed sizes in such fixing the grid lines so that progressive rendering 
could still occur).

But back in reality we have to acknowledge that nothing like this is 
likely ever to happen on the web. The blood, sweat and tears expended in 
getting browsers even close to supporting CSS 2 demonstrates the immense 
inertia that would be needed to get such a big change to positioning 
schemes out into the real world.

-- 
Andrew Clover
mailto:and@doxdesk.com
http://www.doxdesk.com/

Received on Monday, 24 May 2004 09:57:01 UTC