Re: flowing around both sides of a float

On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 04:01:46PM -0800, Brad Kemper wrote:

> I also think we should not proscribe the use of an value based on
> whether or not we think it is good design.

If the value can hardly ever lead to a better layout than what would
exist without the value, then we should consider leaving out that value
to make it easier to implement the spec and so that more user agents
implement more functionality in common with one another.

> Leave it to the designer to decide if the container is too narrow or
> the floating element too wide, as we do now with other floats.

One issue is that the designer doesn't in general know how wide the
container or the float is, due to font substitution, user settings on
font sizes, user style sheets, content not known at design time, etc.

It would be nice if designers could say that a box should be floated,
and let the actual position be influenced by the user agent's knowledge
of these things.  This is particularly valuable when using columns, and
want the float to be able to span columns based on the width of the
float and of the columns and based on how much space is left for text
(i.e. avoiding bad line breaking or having not enough space for one of
the words).

When writing a web page, I usually don't actually care whether it's
floated left or right, and in general I don't know whether it will look
best floated left or right without knowing the font size and window
width etc.

pjrm.

Received on Wednesday, 2 January 2008 09:58:32 UTC