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

I added this to http://wiki.csswg.org/spec/css4-page, let me know if you want to add more.

Currently CSS4 Paged Media is the best match for pagination rules, and reasonable place for brainstorming. Moving to an actual spec, pagination rules should be separate – spec name suggestions are welcome:

CSS Pagination Level 3
CSS Fragmentation Level 3
CSS Breaks Level 3

Any better ideas?

I think I prefer “pagination”, even though it will also deal with breaking text in columns and regions (on the same grounds that I prefer a mouse click event be “onclick”, even though it could be a finger tap).


From: rocallahan@gmail.com [mailto:rocallahan@gmail.com] On Behalf Of Robert O'Callahan
Sent: Thursday, June 02, 2011 2:54 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 6:50 PM, Alex Mogilevsky <alexmog@microsoft.com<mailto:alexmog@microsoft.com>> wrote:
Let’s together figure out the best way to approach this. Can we start a list somewhere of what a good pagination/fragmentation spec needs to have? Once we have it we can decide which spec it belongs to.

The CSS specs often implicitly assume that certain kinds of elements only have one box, and that the "containing block" for an element is a unique ancestor element (or box) that is the same for all the element's boxes, and that the width of the containing block is the same for all an element's boxes. We're probably going to have to break some of those assumptions, and other assumptions that I haven't thought of. Wherever those assumptions are broken, we'll have to figure out how to update the spec so it's not ambiguous.

So for starters, if we're going to allow a block's boxes' widths to adapt to varying container widths, a pagination spec would have to update CSS 2.1 section 10.1 (or whatever it is in the equivalent CSS3 module) to define "containing block" and/or "containing block width" in a way that permits that. I expect "containing block" will have to change from being a function from elements to rectangles to being a function from boxes to rectangles, which means pretty much every mention of "containing block" will need to be checked and updated wherever it is applied to an element that can have more than one box. Hopefully we can find a systematic way to do that.

That's probably not all that would be required in a good pagination spec, but it'd be a great start.

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]