Box Reordering

One of my coworkers was looking at my new flexbox draft, and asked me
why flex-index was limited to flexbox children only.

I didn't have a good answer for him.  Flex units are limited to
flexbox children, because they don't work properly in normal flow (so
far - I'm interested in seeing if we can do something reasonable with
them later).  But does content-reordering cause any similar problems?

It would certainly be *confusing* given a lot of current spec text
that plays loose with the distinction between elements and boxes.  But
I suspect that it's doable.  It may have to wait for a proper spec
detailing the creation and structure of the box-tree from the
element-tree, though, so we can unambiguously talk about element-tree
order and display-tree order.

Does this sound like something vaguely reasonable?  Should I worry
about renaming flex-index to box-index to allow for this ability in
the future?  Should I leave it alone, and just define flex-index as a
synonym for box-index if we end up doing this later?

~TJ

Received on Monday, 24 May 2010 23:54:09 UTC