Possible Fix For Positioning?

I actually was thinking about all the different methods one can use to 
put objects on the page, trying to see if I could find a logical way of 
doing better positining.  And actually, I have a suggestion for 
improving positioning.

Right now, the biggest problem is that there are only 4 types of 
positioning.  There should actually be 5 types.  Multiple times, I've 
wondered why it is only possible to offset an element and leave the 
space (relative), leave it in the flow (static), take it out of the flow 
and position it in a containing element (absolute), or position it in 
the viewport (fixed).  What's missing?

CSS needs a value for positioning that allows a page author to position 
an element like in absolute or fixed, but unlike them, the program 
displaying the page should treat it as if it were in the flow at the 
position where it was moved to.  This would allow the use of positioning 
to define the dimensions of block level elements in terms of other block 
level elements (top:  0; bottom: 0), and basically fix many of the big 
problems designers run into now.

Received on Saturday, 2 April 2005 02:38:45 UTC