RE: Alignment in CSS

On Wed, 2012-04-25 at 08:24 -0700, Stephen Zilles wrote:
> Reposting to www-style:
likewise (sorry) hoping it's OK to quote from Bert's message

On Tue, 2012-04-24 at 20:43 +0200, Bert Bos wrote:
> On Tuesday 24 April 2012 08:27:23 fantasai wrote:
> > http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/specs/css3-align/
> > 
> > I believe this closes the action items on me and Alex from the March
> > 2008 F2F. :)
> 
> An addition to the alternative names:
> 
> An older name for 'block-align' is 'alignment', see 
> http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-box/#the-alignment-property
> 
> And the XSL name for the same feature is even older: 'display-align'. 
> (But that might not be a good choice, because in XSL it only has 
> 'before' and 'after' keywords, while we also need 'left', 'right',
'top' 
> and 'bottom'. Unless we can get XSL to change.)

XSL doesn't use left, right, top, bottom, because of the way it does
i18n; I don't see a problem with CSS using the same name and allowing
additional values, though; if we ever do XSL-FO 2 we'll try to align (so
to speak).

Also, somewhere - I don't know if it belongs in this spec or not - one
needs to be able to specify the behaviour of the last line of a
paragraph independently from the rest - common values for Western
typography (so I can be specific in an example) are that if you have a
justified paragraph the last line is left aligned, but in drama it's
common to right-align.

Typically in print one doesn't justify lines if it makes the word
spacing too large, so there's an additional kind of alignment in which
lines are justified if doing so doesn't make the spaces too wide
(sometimes it's called half-justification, sometimes a justification
zone because you say, lines _this_ long are justified if possible).
Quark used to support it so probably inDesign does too.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2012 17:48:58 UTC