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

On 6/30/05, Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl> wrote:
> Orion Adrian schreef:
> > It's time that W3C styling specs took this into account.
> 
> Have you read http://www.w3.org/Talks/2005/0513-CSS-WWW2005/all.htm ???
> 

Yep, a few times. Doesn't do what I need it to do. It still looks at
layout from the page's viewpoint and not independantly of content.
Content needs it own layout, but there's still no reuse.

> Those are the plans to solve the layout problem, as far as I understand.

And it still breaks incremental rendering when it doesn't have to. See
my other posts on the topic in other threads/

> Although I don't think it is really that much of a problem with CSS
> 2.1... The difficulty of creating layouts easily right now is mainly
> caused by IE's lack of support for the 'display: table' properties and
> absolute positioning with 'width: auto' and a specified left and right
> offsets.

I'm not so much concerned with the end, but the means at this point.
IE isn't the problem. My problem is with the conceptual model that CSS
uses in CSS 1.0, 2.1 and 3.0.

> And I'm not really sure whether it is worthwhile to sacrifice proper
> incremental rendering in favour of being able to specify such grids.

This problem can be fixed without breaking incremental rendering in
most cases, but it requires come changes in how we think about
layouts. It also still has a lot of the problems (e.g. complex
interactions) that need to be solved.

> I think the abovementioned layout techniques are really powerful and
> just not exploited well yet because they just cannot be used currently.
> Look at the amount of resources available about n-column layouts using
> floats and such. Now imagine that display: table and absolute
> positioning would work properly in the no. 1 browser, and the amount of
> information that would become available on using those effectively.

I find display to _be_ the problem. I don't like having my
organizational space spread over lots of rules.

Orion Adrian

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 10:41:45 UTC