Re: Positioned Layout proposal

> On 10/21/10 3:35 PM, Shelby Moore wrote:
>> Those 1000s of elems on page are mostly inline content.
>
> In the cases that worry me, they're mostly absolutely positioned,
> floated, table cells, blocks, etc.

Well if they are absolutely positioned, then there is much less of a
constraint to solve. Tables cells is a repeating structure with a defined
semantics.

I am also skeptical as to whether we can generalize, maintain performance
and avoid nasty circularity errors. So I wouldn't dare propose something
for implementation which wasn't well understood by that time. So please do
not be concerned that I am trying to shove some insane thing down the
implementor's throats (I couldn't any way obviously).

Perhaps I can allocate more time thinking about this at some point,
because CSS as it is now really frustrates me. The tsuris seems mostly to
revolve around the fact that CSS is not designed to support the new Web
applications which want to keep all their content inside the viewport and
create overflowed scrolled sub-areas instead of overflowing the viewport.

Am I missing some easy way to do the following example?

For example, I current have a need to do something like this for my social
network site:

<div>some header content, even has a float:right so it fills the width of
viewport</div>
<table>
   <tr>
      <td><div id='leftPane' style='width:50em; height:?;
overflow:auto'></div>
      <td><div id='rightPane' style='width:?; height:?; overflow:auto'>
                <textarea...><textarea>
                <div id='ChatText' style='width:30em; height:?;
overflow:auto'></div>
             </div>
</table>

What I want is for those height:? to fill up the viewport from their
inline locations to the bottom of the viewport. Ditto the width:? for the
viewport width. So I never want the viewport to scroll, I just want my
overflow:auto to absorb all the overflow.

What I am forced to do now is use JavaScript on a viewport load and resize
events, to calculate those. It is very messy and obfuscates the semantics
of my layout.

With the generalized edge based layout proposed in this thread, I could
easily achieve the above example.

Received on Friday, 22 October 2010 12:05:59 UTC