RE: [css3-linebox] aligning lines

'line-stacking-strategy' does sound like the right property but its name, but I am not sure the current definition actually guarantees that lines align across pages or columns. It will certainly work when all fonts are of the same size, and in some other special cases, but in general layout, with floats, headings, borders etc. present, it will be tricky to define a property that applies to a block and makes its lines align to other blocks.

Shouldn't property that aligns lines in columns/pages belong to an element that contain all of the columns/pages?

If you had something like this:

        body { line-grid-height: 1.2em; }
        body * { line-stacking-strategy: line-grid; }

where 'line-grid-height' is not inheritable, and 'line-grid' stacking places lines at multiples of line-grid-height' *relative to the nearest block that has the 'line-grid-height' set*. This way it will really guarantee that lines align across columns or pages.

(I made up a new property 'line-grid' here which probably should be 'grid-height', but I don't fully understand the intention of 'grid-height' to say it should be redefined this way).

Perhaps some combination of current properties can do this already, but I am not sure how...

-----Original Message-----
From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Håkon Wium Lie
Sent: Friday, January 02, 2009 1:26 PM
To: Tab Atkins Jr.
Cc: L. David Baron; www-style@w3.org
Subject: Re: [css3-linebox] aligning lines


Also sprach Tab Atkins Jr.:

 > > http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-linebox/#line-stacking-strategy

 > Based on that document, it appears that line-stacking-strategy is
 > replaced by line-box-contain and a few other properties.  Is this
 > true?  If so, is this question still relevant?

The requirement to support inter-column baseline alignment stands, and
I 'line-stacking-strategy' sounds like the right property. I'm unsure
about what 'line-box-contain' does, there seems to be a typo in the
description ("height height").

In my mind, I'd like to have one property to describe how to calculate
the height of a line (called line-height, stacking-height or
something), and another to say how to stack the lines. The
inter-column constraint will be a value on the second property.

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Friday, 2 January 2009 22:00:44 UTC