Re: box-align

>-----Original Message----- 
>From: L. David Baron 
>Sent: Friday, April 29, 2011 8:41 PM 
>To: Tab Atkins Jr. 
>Cc: Andrew Fedoniouk ; Alex Mogilevsky ; Brad Kemper ; www-style list 
>Subject: Re: box-align 
>
>On Friday 2011-04-29 12:55 -0700, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> The re-use of 'vertical-align' to do content alignment in table cells
>> was inarguably a mistake.
>
>It was?  Having different properties that do similar things in
>different contexts can be confusing -- authors might have trouble
>remembering which one is which.
>

Exactly.

>
>Also, for the record, the box-align proposal we discussed a few
>years back was about horizontal alignment only.  The proposal in
>this thread seems substantially different, since it puts the
>alignment property on the parent instead of the children, and has
>alignment on both axes.  This adds the capability to align
>vertically, but removes the capability of aligning different child
>blocks differently, and perhaps confuses the model a good bit as
>well.

Not quite so.

Consider XUL's <vbox> alike layout.

vertical-align for it means the following:
Take free space left after all vertical flex computations 
and if the space is greater than zero move *all* elements 
vertically as a whole. 

horizontal-align in it means the following:
For each element compute its horizontal dimensions/flexes and 
if there is free space left move *this* element accordingly.

For <hbox> algorithm is the same (orthogonal symmetry). 
horizontal-align applied to all elements as a whole.
vertical-align is applied individually.

But again all this happens *after* flex computations and
only if there is free space left in corresponding direction.  
So flex values of margins/paddings/width/height on the element 
may  override alignments set by the container.
So we can define individual alignment of elements.

Very flexible to be short.

Plus vertical/horizontal-align shall define alignment 
in overflow:hidden containers.  

-- 
Andrew Fedoniouk

http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Saturday, 30 April 2011 07:03:41 UTC