Re: layout idea

On Mar 19, 2009, at 12:39 PM, David Hyatt wrote:

>> No. We don't flow contents *into* cells. We *absolutely position*  
>> contents to align with edges of particular cells.
>>
>
> Three kinds of positioning:
>
> (1) table-position on a display:table-cell.  The object actually  
> becomes the cell at that position.  A pseudo-element can't refer to  
> this cell position when this is done.
> (2) table-position on a normal flow object like a block.  The object  
> is placed *into* the cell at that position.  If no cell exists at  
> that position, then an anonymous one gets made.  A pseudo element  
> can be used to style this cell.
> (3) position:absolute with grid units.  Provides out of flow  
> alignment to cells in tables.

Please note that I am not totally against #2, above. Just somewhat  
against it, because I think it confuses the understanding of the rest  
of it, complicates things that would otherwise be simpler (the  
automatic wrapping of cells into new rows), and is unnecessary for the  
goals of source-order independence. I think if you had #1 above, plus  
row-spans/col-spans, it would satisfy the vast majority of layout  
needs, and also be a great boon to creating table-like structures out  
of non-table HTML structures (like definition lists, or headline/ 
paragraph combinations).

#3 is a "nice-to-have" for abs-pos items to align with table-display- 
based layouts. #2 just seems extraneous. Is it so that you can put a  
group of things, like paragraphs, into a cell without actually having  
a wrapper of some sort (like <DIV class="article">) around them first?

Received on Friday, 20 March 2009 16:48:18 UTC