Re: [CSS2.1] Clarifying 8.3.1 Collapsing Margins

On Thursday 2010-08-19 11:36 -0700, fantasai wrote:
> This is for CSS2.1 Issue 159
>   http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/css2.1#issue-159
> triggered by this email
>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2010Feb/0015.html
> 
> This is version 3.
> 
>  | In CSS, the adjoining margins of two or more boxes (which could be
>  | siblings or nested) can combine to form a single margin.

The "(which could be siblings or nested)" seems too limiting; as the
note below says, they could be in many other configurations, but
this could be interpreted to restrict them to only those
configurations.  I'd suggest dropping the parenthetical.

>  | Margins that combine this way are said to <dfn>collapse</dfn>, and
>  | the resulting combined margin is called a <dfn>collapsed margin</dfn>.
>  |
>  | Adjoining vertical margins collapse, except:
>  |   * Margins of the root element's box do not collapse.
>  |   * If the top and bottom margins of an element with clearance are
>  |     adjoining, its margins collapse with the adjoining margins of
>  |     following siblings but that resulting margin does not collapse
>  |     with the bottom margin of the parent block.
>  | Horizontal margins never collapse.
>  |
>  | Two margins are adjoining if and only if:
>  |   * both belong to normal-flow block-level boxes that participate
>  |     in the same block formatting context

Since we don't actually define "participate in" a block formatting
context, I think it's important to also say here that neither of the
boxes is the box that establishes the block formatting context.

>  |   * no line boxes, no clearance, and no non-empty padding or border
>  |     areas separate them
>  |   * both belong to vertically-adjacent box edges, i.e. form one of
>  |     the following pairs:
>  |       - top margin of a box and top margin of its first in-flow child
>  |       - bottom margin of box and top margin of its immediately
>  |         following in-flow sibling

I'd suggest dropping "immediately".  I think the immediacy that's
required is covered by the point before (no line boxes, no
clearance, etc.), and this could be interpreted to break margin
collapsing in cases where it should not be broken (floats, collapsed
whitespace).

In fact, it might need clarification to say that a "following
in-flow sibling" could be a later sibling if intervening siblings
are out-of-flow.

>  |       - bottom margin of a last in-flow child and bottom margin
>  |         of its parent if the parent has 'auto' height

I think this should specifically refer to "computed height" rather
than just "height".

I think this also needs to say that 'min-height' is nonzero, but
that's a fix to a transitivity bug existing in the current spec.

>  |       - top and bottom margins of a box with zero used height and
>  |         no in-flow children

As I mentioned in the telecon, changing this to refer to "used
height" is a substantive change that, as we discussed, appears to
disagree with implementations.  This should be changed back to
saying that the computed 'min-height' is '0' and computed 'height'
is '0' or 'auto'.

>  | A collapsed margin is considered adjoining to another margin if
>  | any of its component margins is adjoining to that margin.

> [...]

>  |   * The top margin of an in-flow block element collapses with
>  |     its first in-flow block-level child's top margin if the
>  |     element has no top border, no top padding, and the child has
>  |     no clearance.
>  |   * The bottom margin of an in-flow block element with a
>  |     'height' of 'auto' collapses with its last in-flow block-level
>  |     child's bottom margin if the element has no bottom padding and
>  |     no bottom border and the child's bottom margin does not collapse
>  |     with a top margin that has clearance.

These aren't quite correct in the terminology of CSS, since it
doesn't consider text to be siblings.  So this is saying that the
margins of the div and the p collapse in:
  <div> text <p>text</p> text</div>
(This is an existing problem in the text.)

The second one also needs to be adjusted to match the height changes
above.  The existing text was part of the area where the current
spec breaks transitivity of adjoining-ness.

> [...]

>  | If there are no positive margins, the absolute maximum of the negative
>  | adjoining margins is deducted from zero.

"absolute maximum of the negative adjoining margins" should instead
be "maximum of the absolute values of the adjoining margins".  (I
realize this was existing text, but it's currently wrong.)


This proposal seems fine to me with those changes.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/

Received on Tuesday, 14 September 2010 23:45:11 UTC