- From: L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org>
- Date: Thu, 2 Jul 2009 10:09:57 -0700
- To: Dirk Pranke <dpranke@google.com>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org, ian@hixie.ch
On Thursday 2009-07-02 06:28 +0000, Dirk Pranke wrote:
> That sentence is a bit hard to parse, so this is best illustrated by
> looking at the example:
> https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=32157
> In my interpretation, option #1 is probably what everyone should be
> doing (but no one does). Anyone want to give reasons as to why options
> #2 or #3 make more sense?
I think option #3 is the correct behavior.
After a quick glance at the relevant Gecko code, I don't see why
it's doing #2 rather than #3. It wouldn't surprise me if it was
because we ran into compatibility problems somewhere, but it also
wouldn't surprise me if it was an accident.
The reason option #1 (and, in general, making width calculation
depend on the available space next to floats) is bad is that it
tends to produce layouts that vary in extremely unstable ways under
resizing. For example, a series of floats that, without that
behavior, would wrap into multiple "lines":
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
| | | | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+
| | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+
might, with width calculations that depend on the available space
next to floats, behave exactly as above at some browser widths, but
at an ever-so-slightly wider browser width would instead act like
this:
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-+
| | | | | | | | | |
+-----+ +-----+ +-----+ +-----+ | |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
| |
+-+
+-----+ +-----+
| | | |
+-----+ +-----+
-David
--
L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation http://www.mozilla.com/
Received on Thursday, 2 July 2009 17:10:40 UTC