[css3 box, cssom] flexibility in box-sizing and offset* properties

[Excuse me if this has been discussed before.]

Regarding the current suggestion on box-width/box-sizing, why not generalize
it to all edges, ie margin-box, border-box, padding-box and content-box?
There are situations when all these alternatives can be useful.
Either it can be done by adding more values to box-sizing, or to add more
properties f ex margin-box-width, border-box-width etc, but the latter may
lead to a property name "explosion" as you probably want to offer this
functionality for min-width/max-width, positioning etc.

An alternative could be to use suffixes on existing properties:
  #myDiv {
    width.marginedge: 90%;
    min-width.contentedge: 5em;
  }
where the last property assignment could as well be written as "min-width"
without suffix as it corresponds to the current CSS21 rules. The same system
could apply to positioning properties (top.borderedge etc).

A related feature is being able to query an element's position and size with
respect to different edges using the offset* DOM properties, or similar
feature. Today we see developers using libraries like Dojo (dojo.html.layout
package) to get to this information in a convenient way. It would be a
strength to have this standardized in the browser's native library instead.

Best regards
Mike


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Received on Wednesday, 28 February 2007 10:51:14 UTC