Re: Collapsing elements

James Elmore wrote:
> 
> On Feb 21, 2008, at 10:31 AM, Bert Bos wrote:
> 
>>
> ... [some - informative and interesting - text deleted] ...
>> That would take away all the flexibility. It's not just lists I want to
>> collapse, it's paragraphs and sections as well. And
>> sometimes "collapsing" doesn't mean hiding, but making it smaller or
>> making it gray.
>>
> 
> I meant to say this as well. Expanding the ability to 'fold' and 
> 'unfold' from just lists to spans, paragraphs, divs, even images (think 
> thumbnails vs. full sized) would be a useful ability.
> 
> Be sure that this isn't ONLY tied to the original suggestion of 
> 'tree-lists', but allow the originating notion to work easily with this 
> concept, please.
> 
> Isn't some part of the CSSwg working on collapsing outlines and such? Do 
> they have suggestions for descriptive names?

We'll have to do something some day, because XHTML2's <nl> element is 
expected to collapse. (That expectation was removed from the latest 
XHTML2 draft, but I think the authors of the draft still expect it to 
work that way.)

Hypertext has had collapsing/expanding text long before HTML was 
invented. We should be ashamed that in more than ten years of CSS we 
still have not been able to do the same. (You can use ':target' now, to 
some extent, but it has undesirable side-effects on the Back button and 
no more than one element in a document can be in the ':target' state)

But we're not working on it much, because there are other topics that 
have higher priority at the moment. I just mentioned the last idea I 
knew of, because the topic came up in this thread.



Bert
-- 
   Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
   http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
   bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
   +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 21 February 2008 23:24:40 UTC