[css3-multicol]

We had discussions before on behavior of floats in multicol layout [1], which I believe led to this resolution from June F2F...


   RESOLVED: howcome to add an example of a float intruding into previous

             columns and wait for implementors to complain

... which I read as "we'd like to see something like this happen but not quite sure what is the right way".

This is technically not a complaint, but rather a suggestion how to handle overflow that is easier for implementers and doesn't prevent the desired behavior.

Here is what I propose for floats in multicol:


1)      In [multicol] spec, remove special treatment for overflow of floats. Overflow floats should be clipped to the column exactly as any other kind of overflow would. This way, content that was initially designed for single-column layout has same behavior.

2)      Leave definition of floats that intrude across columns to GCPM [2]. In fact, page floats as currently defined in GCPM are powerful enough to work as shown in [1].

I do realize that taking this proposal would make a subset of cases difficult to implement, e.g. "float this element to the right edge of whatever column it happens to be, then allow it to intrude into previous columns". As a designer, I think I would be willing to live with such limitation, especially if both regular floats and page floats were available. And of course as implementer I would appreciate having multicolumn layout slightly easier to implement...

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/#overflow-inside-multicol-elements
[2] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#page-floats