RE: [css3-regions] New CSS Regions editor draft

I fully agree it is important to have a precise page breaking spec. I don’t see however why regions progress has to be blocked by it. As of today, page breaking behavior is very underspecified, pretty much any non-trivial issue produces 12 different results in 4 major browsers.

CSS Regions spec defines how to describe a set of containers for content to flow through. That definition can be solid without any new details on how content is broken between pages. It can even apply to non-css content (why not SVG? Or PDF?).

What is currently in Regions spec is trying to define more that this spec has to define… What I think it should  have is define meaning of each type of content break within region flow, and stay away from trying to advance paged media spec at the same time.

Alex

From: rocallahan@gmail.com [mailto:rocallahan@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Robert O'Callahan
Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 11:46 AM
To: Alex Mogilevsky
Cc: Vincent Hardy; W3C style mailing list
Subject: Re: [css3-regions] New CSS Regions editor draft

On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 2:16 PM, Alex Mogilevsky <alexmog@microsoft.com<mailto:alexmog@microsoft.com>> wrote:
Right, a regular block should adjust when flowing across varying width regions, it is what most people would expect and so do I.

There should be spec detailing this and other precise rules for pagination. It probably is most appropriate to be defined in CSS4 Paged Media (and it would be great to find an editor willing to write up all these details…)

I very strongly feel that these issues need to be sorted out before CSS3 Regions makes much progress, and ideally before it's even implemented. I don't think "CSS3 Regions" should depend on "CSS4 Paged Media" --- it would sound weird for a CSS3 module to depend on a CSS4 module.

It would be pretty easy in Gecko (and I suspect other engines) to implement the core of CSS3 Regions (and CSS 2.1 page sizes) and get reasonable and interoperable behavior for some common cases where containers have different widths, but get wildly wrong and/or non-interoperable behavior for other cases. Then we get to spend years negotiating implementation differences, fixing bugs, and worrying about compatibility with deployed content. Let's not dig ourselves into that kind of hole again.

Rob
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"Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." [Acts 17:11]