Re: [css3-gcpm] border-length

On Oct 15, 2008, at 4:07 AM, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:

> Also sprach Håkon Wium Lie:
>
>> Now, there may be better or more powerful methods to express this. At
>> the recent F2F it was requested that we find a way to express the
>> "inverse" of border-length, where corners are hidden, but lines
>> between them are visible.
>>
>> Proposals for how to address this is welcome; this is a fairly  
>> immature
>> part of the specification.
>
> Answering my own request, how about a property that list visible
> and invisible lengths, starting with a visible length. For example:
>
> border-parts: 1em auto 2em

I'm still trying to grasp what the spec is trying to achieve with  
border-length or border-parts. Is it so that there can be a short line  
above the footnotes?

It seems to me that what you are starting to create is a way to  
specify the dashes and gaps in dashed borders, which would be very  
broadly useful, not just for this module. It could go into the borders  
module. So, for instance:

border-top: 1px dashed black;
dashes: 1em 2em;

The above would create repeating 1em-wide dashes with 2em gaps. This  
would mean that if you had dashed borders on more than one side of the  
box, they would all share the same dash-gap pattern (as is the case  
today). To recreate your example in the quoted text above, you would  
do it almost the same:

border-top: 1px dashed black;
dashes: 1em auto 2em;

This assumes that if you have more than two lengths, and at least one  
was "auto" (a flex unit, more or less), then the dashes would not  
repeat on that edge. Otherwise they would. For repeating dash-gap  
patterns then, you would probably need to have an even number of  
lengths:

border: 1px dashed black;
dashes: 12px 4px 2px 4px;

In this example, the border would have a repeating pattern of 12px  
dash, 4px gap, 2px dash, and 4px gap. Something a little like this:

------  -  ------  -  ------  -  ------

With this dash notation, you could create even more complex patterns:

border: 1px dashed black;
dashes: 12px 4px 10px 4px 8px 4px 6px 4px 8px 4px 10px 4px;

Received on Wednesday, 15 October 2008 15:25:07 UTC