conditional floats on paged media

You're writing a paper on computer science. For illustrative purposes,
you include short code snippets.

Since they are short and since you don't want the reader to be
distracted by back and forth page flipping, you disallow page breaks
inside the snippets. On the other hand, you don't want to waste precious
space either, so you have no troubles if the snippets are taken out of
the normal flow and positioned on the top of the next page.

You only care that your snippets' listings are visually rendered as a
whole, preferably inside the normal flow if there's sufficient room, or
out of flow, on the next page, otherwise. Of course, you are prepared
for forced breaks if the snippets are longer than a page.

There are CSS working drafts about:

* "CSS Paged Media Module Level 3" (http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-page/)
* "CSS Generated Content for Paged Media Module"
(http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/)

There are new float properties and controls for page breaks but they do
not seem to solve the problem above, not even when combined.

Are there plans to add "conditional" floats to the mentioned specifications?

Thanks
Michel Onoff

Received on Wednesday, 8 August 2012 22:19:32 UTC