Re: Splitting 'display'

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From: "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, April 16, 2010 12:23 PM
To: "www-style list" <www-style@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Splitting 'display'

> It's probably good to explain why I did this.  There are two reasons.
> 
> First, as I stated in the actual text, our conflation of the inside
> and outside values has gotten somewhat ridiculous.  At the very least,
> any new display value has to be duplicated as a block and inline
> version.  This doesn't cover all useful cases, though.  For example,
> it's impossible to make a list-item act like a table, or a table-cell
> to format its children as a flexbox.  Splitting them apart makes this
> all work simply, like its supposed to.
> 
> Second, this makes it much easier to segregate appropriate features
> into particular contexts.  The 'static' and 'text' values for
> display-inside are the "traditional" layout modes in CSS, and are
> meant for laying out a document, not a webpage or an application.
> Some features, like float, only really make sense when used in a
> document context.  Now, we can cleanly say that "float" only has an
> effect when its parent has "static" or "text" display-inline.  Same
> with multicol - we don't have to worry about trying to define that
> multicol doesn't make any sense on a display:table element, for
> example.  Multicol can say it, once, and be done with it.  Then,
> future layout modes don't have to worry about protecting themselves
> against unintended interactions.
> 
> This makes sensibly speccing flexbox easier, as I can define the
> values as new display-inside values, and automatically get (a)
> protection from weird consequences of things being specified that only
> make sense in "static" and "text", or "table"/"table-inside", etc, and
> (b) automatic combination of flexbox in all sensible types of boxes
> (like list-item, table-cell, etc) without interfering with their role
> in their parent's layout algorithm.
> 
> This'll help out Template Layout, too.
> 

Tab, are you trying to re-introduce display-model and display-role 
from here: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-box-20021024/#L706

?

-- 
Andrew Fedoniouk

http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Saturday, 17 April 2010 02:34:55 UTC