Re: Questions about 'column-span'

On May 20, 2010, at 3:29 AM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 8:49 PM, David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com<mailto:hyatt@apple.com>> wrote:
I was thinking about the column-span property as I rewrite multicolumn layout in WebKit, and it seems pretty crazy to me.

http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-css3-multicol-20091217/#column-span

(1) Are there any implementations of this property yet?  My own vote would be for cutting it, since the desired effect can be pretty easily obtained by just wrapping the contents underneath headings in a block and putting multi-column styles on those content blocks.

We don't implement it. It would be very painful for us to implement. I agree it's underspecified, and that the obvious use-cases can be achieved by rearranging the markup. I vote for dropping it.

Without saying anything positive or negative about column span at this point, I have to disagree with at least one of your arguments here.

Given proper separation of content and style, which CSS should always be striving to achieve, telling an author to rearrange the markup in order to obtain a presentational effect is never an acceptable answer (yeah, yeah I know, XSLT and all that, but you get my point).

Peter

Received on Thursday, 20 May 2010 18:33:46 UTC