Re: [css3-multicol] improving the behaviour of floats

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 2:02 AM, David Woolley
<forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> Peter Moulder wrote:
>>
>> There are however (as Christian suggests) a small number of exceptions
>> where
>> the 'float' property is currently used where it is important to start at
>> exactly at the specified line, even if that means moving the current line
>> to
>
> My impression is that, at least in legacy content, float is rarely used for
> true floats, and therefore such content is dependent on the current
> rendering behaviour for "floats".

As an author and a consumer of many CSS tutorials, I can assure you
that in the wild float is widely used for layout rather than
typography.  Virtually all complex pure-CSS layouts rely on float
being interpreted *exactly* as it now.  It's a dirty, dirty hack, and
I consider a tiny bit of layout table to be preferable (and more
widely compatible) to it, though soon we'll have reliable
display:table support and someday after that we'll have Template
Layout and friends to really help out.

It would be impossible to loosen the definition and return it to a
more 'typographical' semantics unless you had some way to
unambiguously indicate that you want this more 'flexible' float
without clashing with current syntax.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 20 May 2009 03:20:22 UTC