Re: flowing around both sides of a float

On Jan 1, 2008, at 6:27 AM, David Woolley wrote:

> James Elmore wrote:
>
>> some of the proposals will be difficult to implement. Also, some  
>> will not be immediately used, simply because they are not known to  
>> be available. But providing tools which make CSS a more complete  
>> system of styling documents will make CSS a more useful tool set.
>
> One of the things that makes a good computing standard is that it  
> achieves a lot with a little.  One of the things that leads to the  
> eventual death of computing standards is that whilst they start  
> that way, they eventually try to do everything.  As a result they  
> get too complex (CSS is already well beyond the point where most  
> authors understand it well enough to be able to know whether there  
> are features to do things they want).

In this case (float:center), the "float" concept is well understood,  
and "center" is a common value to accompany "left" and "right" as  
keywords to describe horizontal position. Authors will not have a  
hard time understanding the addition of the "center" value to the  
"float" attribute. They may, on the other hand, have a hard time  
understanding why it is missing.

Float (or something like it) would be especially useful if it could  
be positioned absolutely, yet still affect the flow (so that inline  
elements and other traditional floats did not overlap it, and would  
be effected by its margin). The details of how that would work would  
probably be more complex, but the effect that float:center should  
have is pretty clear.