Re: New layout language.

Orion Adrian wrote:

>On 7/6/05, Kris@meridian-ds.com <Kris@meridian-ds.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Orion,
>>
>>Most of what you've said is patently absurd.  I've argued with you, I've
>>humored you, I've even taken time out of my day to educate you when you
>>couldn't (wouldn't) take the time to figure it out for yourself... despite
>>the fact that it's obvious.
>>    
>>
>
>My point is that it wasn't obvious. You yourself said, you had to
>figure some things out. I've spent years with CSS and while I haven't
>recently, the system is very complex in how it interacts with itself.
>  
>

I'd just like to point out here that most CSS experimentation involves 
finding out what IE will do with certain types of code.  It's rare that 
I run CSS through both Firefox and Opera and find major differences with 
how it's interpreted.  In fact, 99 out of 100 times, it'll be 
interpreted exactly as the CSS standards say, which means I can 
visualize it in my head.

With IE, on the other hand, actually predicting how the system will 
treat the code is like tiptoeing through a minefield.  IE does some of 
the oddest things with CSS I've ever seen, especially when you start 
using floats to position objects.

What you seem to miss here, is that the problem is not that right and 
bottom are pointless, but that IE doesn't support right or bottom 
correctly.  If it did, all CSS would really need is a type of 
positioning that can be positioned like position: absolute but that uses 
the float model for determining the position of inline objects, or a 
type of positioning that in general allows the positioned object to 
effect the size of parent elements/sibling elements.  Then columns could 
be created simply by using top: 0; bottom: 0, and on top of that, would 
be totally accessible and NOT dependent on source order at all (after 
all, most people surround blocks of content with <div> elements, and 
XHTML2's role element will likely be used in the future for situations 
like this).  Even a grid system could help here, though IMO it might be 
better to simply work with the positioning model.  It's not that far off 
from what it needs to be at this point; and yes, I agree that min-left, 
min-right, min-top and min-bottom would help a lot when it came to using 
percentages (the last site I designed, I used ems to size columns 
because it allowed me to force the gaps to be a consistent size).

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Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2005 18:53:11 UTC