Re: [css3-multicol] overflow and paging?

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Shelby Moore <shelby@coolpage.com> wrote:
> [snip]
>
>>>  I don't think we need a new keyword - the behavior we want is
>>> already specifiable with the vh unit, which represent 1% of the
>>> viewport's height.  So you could have something like
>>> "column-max-height: 100vh" as the default value.  It would otherwise
>>> accept any length, with a value of 'auto' meaning "no maximum height".
>>
>>
>> Very nice generalization. Thank you for spending the effort.
>
> [snip]
>
> On further thought, this won't work correctly.  The column-max-height
> needs to be constrained to its outer container's block direction dimension
> constraint (aka height), not to the viewport.

This can be done with a "column-max-height:100%", assuming we define
percentages to be relative to the height of the multicol element.  (If
you have padding/border/etc, you'll have to use a calc() to get the
value right.)


> Minor rant: why in CSS do we have to say "width (aka inline direction)"?
> Why couldn't we reuse the same term?  Is width never in the inline
> direction?  Then why do we say that "column-width" always applies to the
> "inline direction"?  Should it be named "column-inline-length" instead?
>
> This is making the discussion and teaching of CSS columns very difficult
> and verbose.  Can we fix this?

"width" is the extent in the horizontal direction.  In vertical text,
this is not the same as the inline direction.

We could fix this in the same way we fixed the physical dependency of
top/right/bottom/left, by coming up with a pair of logical-direction
keywords to use in place of width/height.  No one's come up with a
good set yet, though.  (I think last time the discussion came up, we
were happy to use "length" for one of them, probably height, but
couldn't come up with a good one for width.)

~TJ

Received on Friday, 15 October 2010 17:48:33 UTC