Re: float:center

On Dec 31, 2007, at 5:13 AM, David Woolley wrote:

>
> James Elmore wrote:
>> Some magazines used to position an image or 'pull out quote' in the  
>> middle of articles. While I have seen the more common 'float between
>
> My understanding is that this is typically done to break up long  
> runs of text.  I'd suggest that this can only really be done well in  
> a print image document, and that any such capability for a  
> reflowable document would need to be done at a much higher level,  
> i.e. by specifying parameters used to choose when to dump the quote,  
> etc.
>
> Incidentally, in typical magazine typography, there is little or no  
> relationship between the quotes and the surrounding contents.  At  
> the best they represent a separate stream of text for the article as  
> a whole.  The positioning doesn't normally reflect a natural break  
> in the body text, but rather reflects good aesthetics when looked at  
> from a distance.
>
> If floats are used for this purpose with HTML/CSS, I'd suggest that  
> either the author is using the tools in a closed environment, to  
> create a print image, or they are making the common, but  
> unreasonable, assumption that what they see is what others will see.

Is that unreasonable though? Printed documents are within the scope of  
this, or so I thought. And besides, if the intent is to break up a  
long stream of text is the intent, can't this be accomplished on a  
webpage also, supposing you had this? It seems as if you could use  
float:center to accomplish this, and either have the break occur close  
to where you want, or exactly where you want, depending. If the float  
were in between two p elements, for instance, the second would reflow  
around, giving this effect at the exact placement wanted. Or am I  
visualizing this incorrectly?

John Oyler
john@discrevolt.com