Re: We are where we are.... but how did we get here?

On Wednesday 2005-06-29 15:50 +0100, Paul Duncan wrote:
> For example I would love someone to write an explanation on the W3C website
> behind the box model the W3C choose to adopted?
> Why is a second pass unworkable? (computing power has increased
> significantly since 1998... I can play Doom on my phone :-)

A second pass that would do what?  (I asked the same thing in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Jun/0228 in a little
more detail.)

> Why can't I style a div to align centre using align:center but instead have
> to use margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto? 

I've come around to thinking that we should have a property like this.
It would be pretty easy to define within the current model:  it would
simply control which margin is automatically converted to 'auto' in what
section 10.3 describes as the overconstrained case, and it would default
to 'start' (or to inheriting from 'direction') for compatibility with
the current spec.

It doesn't have anything to do with multi-pass layout, though.  I'm not
sure if you intended to imply that it did, or what you meant by a second
pass.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
          Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, The Mozilla Foundation