Re: [CSS3] Proposal to add list-style-type: tree-line value

On Wednesday 2008-02-20 12:56 -0800, Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> I think it makes sense to add another value to the list-style-type 
> enumeration - "tree-line".
>
> So if you have defined something like this:
>
> ul > li
> {
>   display: list-item;
>   list-style-type: tree-line;
>   |outline-color:powderblue;
> }
>
> then you will be able to define lists with tree lines.
> See two samples at the bottom of:
> |
> http://www.terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/images/tree-view-lines.png

So writing a spec for this is far from trivial.  A spec, for only
the visual part (ignoring any behavioral aspects, which are likely
to be out of scope for CSS) is going to have to cover two main
areas:

 * how to draw the tree lines/twisties.  There are a bunch of
   different cases:
   Twisties for:
    * tree nodes without children
    * tree nodes with children, expanded
    * tree nodes with children, collapsed
   and then the lines, which need to connect a node to all of its
   children that are tree nodes.  We would need rules explaining how
   to draw all of these things (this seems related to the
   'appearance' property).

   It's not clear to me whether rules for drawing would satisfy 90%
   of authors or whether they'd satisfy 10% of authors.  I suspect
   if the trees looked sufficiently like operating system trees it
   might satisfy a large enough percentage of authors to be worth
   implementation in browsers.  But it's not worth implementing
   something that authors wouldn't use because it doesn't look the
   way they want.

 * how to determine what list items are connected with each other.
   CSS currently has only a concept of list-item, and no concept of
   list containment.  For example, are list items in a child of a
   list item a child list of that item?  What about a grandchild?
   Great-grandchild?  Does it depend whether there are other
   siblings?  For example, how would you render list-style-type:
   tree-item on markup like:

   <ul>
     <li>item</li>
     <li>item
         <h3>A section</h3>
         <div>
           <p>Some text.</p>
           <ul>
             <li>Is this item connected by tree lines to its
             great-grandparent?</li>
           ...

    The key question here is:  is it possible to come up with rules
    that work here for 90% or more of cases?  Or will authors need
    to use selectors to say how their lists work?

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Friday, 28 March 2008 21:28:20 UTC