What 'Advanced Layout' suggestions have been proposed?

It seems that a lot of people have suggested a lot of different ways
to do 'advanced layout' or at least, features that might end up in
CSS3 advanced layout module. It seems like a royal pain for the WG to
have to keep track of every suggestion, so let's make a list for them,
then they can evaluate them (hopefully) and choose what they think
is/are the best solution(s) and/or CSS improvements for advanced
layout.

Please offer other suggested solutions, other wordings for the current
solutions, and references to the original location of the suggestion.

Here's what I have so far (perspectives in regard to layout):

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WHAT: move-to
TYPE: property
REFERENCE: ? - Currently in the 'Generated Content' Module
DESIGN NOTE(S): Designed for footnotes. It'll probably be used for
layout as well, though that's not the purpose (kind of like floats,
not the purpose, but a use).
AUTHOR PERSPECTIVE: Not the most powerful, but allows some manipulation of
presentation dependent on semantics of the information (the structure
of the data). Is most useful when used in connection with inline
footnotes where a simple 'move-to' the end of the document makes a
whole lot of sense.
USER-AGENT PERSPECTIVE: Fairly easy to implement. Just don't display the
element during progressive rendering, until it meets one of the
clearly defined rules for display. Adopting this will be very
beneficial in displaying things like e-books, and a lot of
hyper-information (whether online or off). (e.g. think of the help for
programs. That's HTML generally and those user-agents will want to
make it easier to store their own help files, so this is very likely
to be widely implemented I believe.)

=====
WHAT: Parent pseudo-containers
TYPE: Syntax addition
REFERENCE: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Apr/0058.html
DESIGN NOTE(S): Designed for better (awesome) author control
AUTHOR PERSPECTIVE: Ultimate control. Easy to use, though a different
syntax will confuse some, or many, developers. Allows for fine-grained
control that many crave.
USER-AGENT PERSPECTIVE: Progressive Rendering is harder to implement
(see REFERENCE for description of how it works)Also, will cause some
slow down in rendering (albeit most-likely un-noticeable) because the
browser will have to parse for the 'exception' to the syntax rules. In
the CSS3 syntax, the user-agent is supposed to parse all rules, even
those they don't understand, ignoring the ones that it doesn't
understand, however when you change the rules for parsing, we might
run up against backward-incompatibility because older browser will
choke on a different syntax, thus the CSS, by shear nature of the
goals of its design, must degrade gracefully (to an extent) throwing
this in could cause significant problems. (I say could because I don't
know for sure)

=====
WHAT: absolute-containing-block
TYPE: property
REFERENCE:http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Sep/0189.html
DESIGN NOTE(S): Designed with fairly easy implementation and use in mind
AUTHOR PERSPECTIVE: Not the most powerful, but allows control over
display without dependance on semantics, as it is taken out of flow.
Easier to work with than move-to, with the restriction that this
applies only for absolutely positioned elements.
USER-AGENT PERSPECTIVE: Fairly easy to implement. Not displayed until
the containing block is shown, then can be positioned on top without
causing a reflow. Also, when the element is after the containing
block, you can just put it on top (higher z-index, unless explicitly
defined by a style sheet), no reflow. Easy for progressive rendering.
not as likely to be implemented as the move-to, but still fairly easy,
so I think fairly likely to be widely implemented.)

Received on Wednesday, 28 September 2005 02:29:10 UTC