Re: [css3-regions] pagination and inline elements

On 5/12/11 5:24 AM, "Alex Mogilevsky" <alexmog@microsoft.com> wrote:

> The regions draft is getting very solid, impressive!
> 
> Here is some more feedback on the spec
> 
> * Issue 1: could inline elements be regions?
> 
> I think not. But the fact that you are asking this question tells me that you
> may be thinking of region's ability to redirect content separately from its
> ability to paginate. It is an interesting line of thought, and it creates
> interesting templating possibilities. I thought about it too... but I couldn't
> come up with any strong use cases where non-paginating regions would enable
> something that is not possible otherwise. Do you have any?
> 
> So for now I prefer to think about regions as always being "pages" linked into
> a chain, which is filled from a named flow.

One way to think about single-page regions is to look at uses for
single-page multicolumn. If you know that your text will fit on a single
screen, but readability will improve if you break it into columns with a
shorter measure, you can usefully use multicolumn without pagination.

Wherever you can use multicolumn without pagination you can also use regions
without pagination. Since regions are not constrained to inhabit the same
box or have consistent widths or lengths, you have more control over how the
columns fit into your design. There could be content that straddles columns
or a design that moves from a single column to two or three. Some of these
designs can be accomplished now using floats, but some are not possible and
many might be expressed more simply using regions.

And there are uses for regions outside of columns - we have a dropcap
example using a region for an initial, larger word where the rest of the
text wraps around the last glyph. Because we're using regions the text is
contiguous and can be searched for and selected across the dropcap boundary.
Our example file does this using an absolutely positioned element, but it
would probably be better to use a float (which is an argument for allowing
regions to be floats).

Thanks,

Alan

Received on Thursday, 12 May 2011 20:23:49 UTC