RE: [css3-regions] Feedback on regions document

> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On Behalf
> Of Vincent Hardy
> Sent: Friday, May 13, 2011 2:13 PM
> 
> > If that div becomes a region, how do you know how wide it is going to
> be? Let's go further and even say it is the first region in a chain of
> regions for a given flow and its height is set at 100px.  How do we know
> how wide it's going to be?  Hint: the answer can't be "let's flow into
> that height to see what fits and then size to the width of the contents."
> Layout engines just don't work that way.   They determine the width first
> and then lay out contents to determine the height, not the other way
> around.  You can't reverse that, especially not for the table algorithm.
> ...
>
> > In practice authors are going to have to specify height or max-height to
> prevent a region from just consuming all of the content anyway, so it
> doesn't seem like a big deal that they would also specify a min-width or
> width in the case of layout systems that use intrinsic widths.

I am very cautious about creating a kind of element that has both pagination and sizing to content. It appears possible in some cases (clearly the dropcap example in Adobe prototype would benefit form a shrink-to-fit container for the dropcap), but it sounds scary as a general concept. It is possible that my fears are unsubstantiated, I'll think more about it...

Alex

Received on Friday, 13 May 2011 22:17:52 UTC