Re: [css3-flexbox] Too many flex-flow values?

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 6:41 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:
> Every time I look at the 'flex-flow' property, I get a headache.  I
> think there are too many options there.  You can specify the flow
> directions purely logically, purely physically, or an interesting
> mixture of the two.
>
> I've already logged an issue in the spec about dropping the mixed
> physical/logical options, so we have only the all-logical and
> all-physical ones.  That would significantly simplify the syntax
> without, I think, actually killing any useful options.
>
> Can we go further?  Grid Layout doesn't care about your pitiful
> physical direction - the orientation and direction of rows and columns
> are *always* tied directly to logical directions.  'flex-flow' would
> be *so* much nicer if we could do the same:
>
> flex-flow: [ row | row-reverse | column | column-reverse ]
>           [ wrap | wrap-reverse ]?
>
> *Are* there any significant use-cases that aren't addressed by this?
> If so, why aren't these problems with Grid Layout as well?

Based on the feedback in this thread, I'm going to remove the physical
and semi-physical directions, and stick with solely the four logical
directions.

In particular, the feedback that convinced me was the fact that Grid
Layout uses only logical directions, and Webkit claims it is actually
easier for them to do pure logical (while it's neutral for IE).

The fact that we don't have logical margins/width/etc means that this
still doesn't allow you to design a writing-mode independent site, but
that seems to be a problem we have to solve generally anyway, so I
don't feel that partially working around the problem within Flexbox
would be very productive.  (If this is a convincing objection, then we
should drop the logical directions entirely, and change Grid to be
physical as well.)

~TJ

Received on Friday, 16 September 2011 20:22:48 UTC