Re: [css3-flexbox] is 'wrap-reverse' confusing?

On 07/04/2012 08:34 AM, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu wrote:
> 'flex-flow: wrap-reverse' or perhaps the the
> 'flex-direction'/'flex-wrap' split in general is a bit confusing to me.
> Before I started to read the spec
>
> A. I thought that 'flex-flow: row wrap-reverse' was
>
>    A B C
>    F E D
>    G H I
>
> , or the S shape (reverse the line when the line wraps). 'flex-flow: row
> wrap-reverse' being a multi-line flex container stacking from below is
> quite confusing and I am not sure it has use cases (this reminds me that
> we don't have 'writing-mode: horizontal-bt')
>
> 'flex-flow: column wrap-reverse' on the other hand is quite understandable.

I don't think there's anything I can do about this... I can't think of
anything that would be better, and imo wrap-reverse is pretty good.

> After learning the main/cross directional terms
>
> B. I had the impression that 'flex-direction' misses the definition of
> 'cross-start'/'cross-end'.
>
> I later realized that they are defined in 'flex-wrap', which is a bit
> weird since I would sort of expect the control of the direction for both
> axis is on a single property.

That's why we have 'flex-flow', and all the examples use it.

> I have several proposal proposals from changing the 'wrap-reverse'
> keyword, reducing certain combinations or changing the whole syntax, but
> I'll stop here for now because there's only 30 minutes left for the
> telecoms and fantasai asked me to throw in all the substantive comments.

We had lots and lots of conversations about this whole thing awhile back,
how to represent all possible combinations, and make it understandable.
The full set we came up with can be seen [1] here:
   http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/csswg/raw-file/aaab808294de/css3-flexbox/Overview.html#flex-flow
At this point there was only 'flex-flow'. Later the physical values were
dropped, and, since this made invalid combinations impossible, the property
was split into 'flex-direction' and 'flex-wrap', with 'flex-flow' as a
shorthand.

I doubt we'll change it at this point, but if you think you have something
substantially better, I suppose you can try to convince the WG. :)

[1] I'm somewhat annoyed that we don't have a /TR snapshot of it so people
     besides the editors would know about and could find this. :/ I had
     requested one at the time, but the editors thought Mercurial was
     sufficient record.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 5 July 2012 04:55:51 UTC