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

Ok, let’s get specific there.

We are going to have variable-width regions, and it will be common. What aspects of content pagination we need to have clarified or defined in order to be able to have interoperable implementations of a usable set of important use cases?

Once we come up with a list that needs to be resolved, we can decide what spec it should be in. I personally don’t see any problem implementing CSS3 Regions and CSS4 Paged Media together if it is what it takes to render content that we all care about.

From: rocallahan@gmail.com [mailto:rocallahan@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Robert O'Callahan
Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 12:38 PM
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 2:59 PM, Alex Mogilevsky <alexmog@microsoft.com<mailto:alexmog@microsoft.com>> wrote:
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.

We've gotten away with it so far because containers with varying width don't come up all that often --- currently only when printing and authors use @page rules to change the available width on particular pages, and there's not a lot of need for that.

But with regions, we will have variable-width containers almost any time regions are used.
 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?).

I'm not saying it has to be in the Regions spec. It would make sense for the changes to be in their own spec or distributed across other CSS3 modules that update the spec of block-and-line etc.

I'm saying that if we start shipping implementations of Regions without a spec for how variable-width containers work, we will have a big problem.

Rob
--
"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]