Re: flowing around both sides of a float

On Jan 1, 2008, at 3:21 PM, Brad Kemper wrote:

>
> 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.

It isn't clear how this could work. Float:absolute, and then it uses  
left/right/top/bottom for positioning? I'm all for float:center in  
principle at least, but at least I could wrap my head around how it's  
supposed to work. Something more flexible isn't as obvious even when I  
spend time thinking it through. Also, would there be any point in a  
float:center if it were implemented? If you can derive one behavior  
from the other...


John Oyler
john@discrevolt.com

Received on Tuesday, 1 January 2008 20:32:03 UTC