Re: box-align

On Apr 29, 2011, at 8:41 PM, L. David Baron wrote:

> 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.

I recall arguing for putting it on the parent instead of the children in that conversation too. It is much more intuitive to set the alignment on the parent than to find all the children and have them work it out individually what alignment they should each be. Consider 'text-align', which is orders of magnitude more intuitive than 'margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;'. With 'text-align' on a single line, the children are the glyphs and spans and such inside the line box parent. But we only ask the parent to align its children once; we don't ask each glyph and span what it's alignment should be relative to its parent.

Aligning different child blocks differently is much more confusing (to people, not necessarily to "the model") and harder for authoring. I don't think this actually removes anything, anyway. You can still use 'margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;' or flexible margin using flex-box.

Received on Saturday, 30 April 2011 17:17:42 UTC