Re: [css3-regions][css3-exclusions][css3-gcpm] Plan B

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 6:04 AM, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com> wrote:
> As expressed earlier in this forum [1][2][3], I believe in regions and
> exclusions, but I have some ideas about how to better express them in
> CSS. Others have expressed similar concerns [4][5][6][7]. Based on
> this, I've written up an alternative proposal and added it to the GCPM
> editor's draft [8]:
>
>   http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#exclusions
>   http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#regions
>
> For comparison purposes, I refer to the GCPM-based proposal as Plan B,
> and the set of proposals [9][10][11] championed by Microsoft and Adobe
> as "Plan A".

While I generally prefer the pseudo-element approach, basing it off of
multicol has some issues.  Namely, it's incompatible with new layout
modes like Flexbox and Grid.

Right now, Flexbox defines that the multicol properties compute to
their initial values on a flexbox (I presume that Grid has or intends
something similar, but I can't immediately find it).  To make this
work together, I'd have to change Flexbox to work with multicol,
likely by treating the column boxes as flexbox items.  This would be
rather complex, though, as it would require me to define how column
auto-balancing worked in combination with Flexbox's own constraints,
which doesn't sound particularly fun.  Grid has similar sets of
constraints in its layout, and thus has similar difficulties with
column auto-balancing.

This might work if we say that column-balancing doesn't work outside
of a block-flow context.

Purely within the context of block element with column-balancing, this
still brings up new questions.  What happens when you're trying to
balance columns, but one of the columns is shorter than the rest?

(Also, Hakon, you broke the GCPM spec within the last couple of minutes.)

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 27 December 2011 19:39:35 UTC