Re: [css3-multicol] should spanner margins collapse?

On 29/09/2011 14:06, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> The CSS WG is discussing margin collapsing on spanning elements
> ("spanners") and would like some feedback. The basic question is:
> should margins set on consecutive spanners collapse?
>
> Consider this markup:
>
>    <div class=multicol>
>       <h1>Heading</h1>
>       <h2>Subheading</h2>
>       <p>............
>    </div>	
> 		
> And this styling:
> 		
>    div.multicol { columns: 10em; border: ... }
>    h1, h2 { column-span: all; margin: 1em 0 }
> 		
> If the browser doesn't support multicol, margin collapsing would occur
> between the h1, h2, and p elements.
> 		
> If the browser supports multicol, the content of<p>  will appear in
> multiple columns, and the spanners will stretch across. The rendering
> could be something like:
> 		
>      ___________________________________
>     |                                   |
>     | Heading                           |
>     |                                   |
>     | Subheading                        |
>     |                                   |
>     | ...............   ............... |
>     | ...............   ............... |
>     | ...............   ............... |
>     |___________________________________|
> 		
> In the above ascii art, the margins between the h1 an h2 elements have
> collapsed.
> 	  	
> A releated issue is how to deal with floats; should floats be able to
> cross over from one spanner to the next?
> 	
> Thee WG has three possible solutions to this issue. Here's a comparison:
>
>              Do spanners create BFCs?                MC       XF     MC-c
>
> (a)         no, but (consecutive) spanners          yes      yes    yes
>              with identical column-span value
>              are wrapped into one anonymous BFC
>
> (b)         yes, but the margins of the BFC         no       no     no
>              don't collapse (unlike other BFCs)
>
> (c)         yes, and they collapse as other BFCs    yes      no     no
>
> where
>
>    BFC = block formatting context
>    MC = margin-collapse between consecutive spanners
>    XF = cross floats between consecutive spanners
>    MC-c = margin-collaps between consecutive spanners, including children
>
> The specification [1] today suggests (c). But it can be changed if,
> e.g., XF or MC-c are important to authors. Are they?
>
> Or, we could do (b) if authors would rather avoid MC/XF in multicol.
> One argument in favor of this is: If we add integer values to
> 'column-span' in the future, the spanners become more like floats. And
> floats don't do MC/XF.

Given the primary use case (headings that span all columns) I think we 
should defer to typical print usage where that use case is quite common. 
  It appears to me that margins between consecutive spanners /do/ 
collapse in print contexts.  This would rule out option (b).

I don't see much similarity between spanners and floats.  To my mind, a 
2-column spanner doesn't behave like a float, because the spanner 
remains in flow and hence there is no concept of surrounding content 
breaking around it.  Something that would be more similar to floats 
would be pull-quotes (where I think I would expect no collapsing with 
surrounding content) but that's not what spanners are.

My preference is (a) because I don't see any reason not to make the 
behaviour of multicol as close as possible to the CSS21 behaviour, which 
would aid authors trying to support both modern (multicol-aware) and 
legacy UAs with the same stylesheet.

Cheers,
Anton Prowse
http://dev.moonhenge.net

Received on Wednesday, 19 October 2011 14:07:05 UTC