Re: [css3-regions] Feedback on regions document

Hi David,

On May 12, 2011, at 11:01 AM, David Hyatt wrote:

> On May 11, 2011, at 3:07 PM, David Hyatt wrote:
> 
>> 
>> One thing that's very unclear to me is how regions are sized.  I am not convinced that this can be hand-waved away as some other spec's problem.  For example, if a positioned element that is acting as a region has no height or width specified, how wide is it?  How tall is it?  What is the intrinsic width of such an element?  I see the same issue occurring for grid-cells or flex-boxes as well.  Unless you fix the width of the region prior to flowing content into it, there are a lot of layout questions to answer.
> 
> Just to elaborate on this further, I am specifically talking about layouts like the automatic table layout algorithm where there is a notion of a minimum preferred width (break at every opportunity) and a maximum preferred width (never break).   I don't understand how you could possibly calculate those values for regions, since you don't know beforehand what content will actually be in the region.  I'm going to make a simplifying suggestion: the preferred widths of a region are computed as though the region has no content.
> 
> In effect this would mean that for objects like table cells and positioned elements, you would need to either fix the width or specify a minimum width if you don't want the content to just push to the next region. I think this is pretty reasonable and can't really think of any better way to do it.  (Using all of the content is another possibility, but then you'd just be too wide all the time.)

I am a bit confused with your follow up, so I would appreciate if you could say what you think of my previous response to your question (below) because I am not sure if your proposal is building up on it or not (just trying to make sure we are on the same page). If it is building on what I responded, could you say what issue there is with that approach? 

Here was the answer:

> We actually thought about this, and we tried to express it in the spec., but it is done a bit indirectly (in the section about how flow breaking rules (2.3). A container block that does not have a width/height set would behave like any normal container block that flows its normal content. In other words, it would possibly consume all the flow because it would not ever overflow.
> 
> So if we had the "article_flow" flow through region A and region B, and region A did not have a width/height set, then it would be able to fit all the boxes in the flow and content would never reach region be. It would behave as if we had had:
> 
> <div id="region_A">
>        <div id="article">..</div>
> </div>
> 
> Does that answer your question?


Cheers,
Vincent

Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 02:42:07 UTC