Re: [CSS3 Text] request: line-padding

On Jan 20, 2010, at 5:56 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

>> Finally, if each line is 'cloned', I think there should be a
>> CSS-selector for each line.  This would potentially allow for
>> zebra-style colouring.  Admittedly I don't have a use-case in mind for
>> this, but it's an idea.
> 
> The main problem with this is that ::first-line is already pretty
> screwed up and crazy, and we're somewhat reluctant to multiply this
> craziness by introducing an ::nth-line() pseudoclass.  

True that.

> On the other
> hand, formatted code often uses a light zebra striping, so there is an
> existing use-case.

It sounds to me like you are describing a background pattern. Create an image 1px wide, and as tall as two lines of text. Make the top half of the image one color and the bottom half a different color, and repeat it across the whole multi-line block. Use 'background-size' to keep it the height of 2 lines of text (3em in your example), maybe starting with a larger-than-needed image so that it scales well. 

In fact, if done this way, I don't think you would need to mess with a span, you could just put the padding on the whole box. This also gets the last line of the stripe to go all the way across, even if the text doesn't.