Re: breaking overflow

> James Hopkins wrote:
>
> (snip)
>>> I don't think it is any worse that relying on a side effect of  
>>> overflow settings. In fact, I think that creating a presentaional  
>>> effect of a separate markup element without having the actual  
>>> element present in the markup is a perfectly valid and important  
>>> use case for ':after' (or with the ':before' example I posted  
>>> earlier).
>> I'm not arguing that the generated content method is inferior; the  
>> 'overflow' method is just as much of a hack.
>
> Why is it a hack?

Since we're exploiting a property purely for the purposes of  
harnessing its side-effect. I would make the assumption that around  
80% of 'overflow:hidden' s application in the real-word is to clear  
floats in this way, rather than employing it for its primary purpose.

> Another use of overflow:hidden is to trim the margin-box of a block  
> level element in normal flow to the margin-edge of a sibling float.  
> The purpose of this is to allow a border of this element to stop at  
> the same place as other siblings with inline content or line boxes.

The float-displace property appears to do what you want here, I think,  
but I know what you mean.