Re: [css3-multicol] column overflow

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 5:42 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>wrote:

> So here's a completely different proposal: overflow-mode:paginate.
>
> The idea: if an element has overflow-mode:paginate and would have a
> scrollbar in the block-progression-direction, instead of a regular scrollbar
> presentation, paginate the content into individual "pagelets" and show page
> navigation UI instead of the block-progression-direction scrollbar.
>
> This has several advantages. The biggest advantage I can see is that you
> could apply it to the root of most any page, including the standard "header
> + sidebars + central column of multiple article" layout that's ubiquitous,
> and in principle it would give you great results. Your engine would have to
> make sure that columns flow properly from page to page of course, but Gecko,
> at least, does that. You could also apply it to a single element with
> columns and get good results. There is no issue about spacing or styling
> individual column sets, because only one is visible at a time.
>
> The biggest disadvantage that I can see is that there is then no way for
> the user to view content from different horizontal column sets at the same
> time.
>

That... would be pretty much ridiculously awesome for various other things.
 Say you're doing a multi-page form.  Right now the author has to explicitly
handle pagination controls by themselves, and woe to the user if the author
didn't put in the ability to go back (maybe there's state that should be
maintained that prevents simple use of the Back button).  At this very
moment at work I'm implementing a multi-question quiz where one question is
displayed per page.  This would have made the entire thing ridiculously
simple, as the entire quiz would be a single form (right now, I have to very
carefully manage state in the database as you go from question to question).

Plus this lets us standard web authors play with the paged content section,
which would be fun.  ^_^  It would require some work on
styling/positioning/etc. the UI elements (which I suppose would be replaced
content, and thus not overly stylable), but still, this would be useful for
a wide range of things outside of multi-col.

~TJ