negative lengths for border-spacing (was Re: border-radius)

On Saturday 2008-09-06 11:07 -0700, Brad Kemper wrote:
> On Sep 6, 2008, at 12:03 AM, fantasai wrote:
>> I'd rather enable negative lengths for 'border-spacing' and let authors
>> simulate the same effect with that.
>
> Negative lengths for border-spacing is an awesome idea. Any idea why its 
> not allowed already? Can that be added in time for IE8, FireFox 3.1, 
> Chrome 1.0, etc.?

This could get quite complicated, for two reasons:

 (1) Table layout algorithms may be making assumptions about certain
 widths being nonnegative (the border-spacing itself, column
 advances, etc.).

 (2) It can cause overflow in unexpected ways both due to the
 border-spacing around the edge of the table and due to negative
 column or row advances.

I wouldn't be willing to enable this for Firefox 3.1 without
spending a while combing through the table code to see what
assumptions it might break.  And I think I have much higher priority
things to work on.

And I don't see a strong use case for it.  I can't figure out what
the use case was in
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Sep/0055.html

-David

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

Received on Tuesday, 16 September 2008 22:16:34 UTC