Re: [css3-align] The Great Alignment Bikeshed

fantasai:

>  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-align/#overview
> 
>      X) inline (main)
>      Y) stacking (cross)
>      A) element itself within its containing block
>      B) element's contents within itself
>      C) element's child items within their container
> 
>   +--------X----------------Y------
> A |     box-justify      box-align
> B | content-justify  content-align
> C | default-justify  default-align
> 
>   +--------X----------------Y------
> A |    self-justify     self-align
> B | content-justify  content-align
> C |    item-justify     item-align
> 
>   +--------X----------------Y------
> A | justify-outside  align-outside
> B | justify-inside   align-inside
> C | justify-items    align-items

I’m not a fan of ‘child’, because that is easily confused with DOM tree descendants, but it’s currently not used anyway.

The “Inversion” row makes some sense, because ‘justify-box’/‘align-box’ sound like English phrases in the imperative mood, whereas ‘box-justify’/‘box-align’ sound odder (to me as a non-native speaker) than ‘box-justification’/‘box-alignment’.

‘default-*’ seems just wrong, not least because of the ‘default’ keyword.

I think ‘box’ and ‘content’ are good terms and without doing further reading (and thinking), I’m not sure why we need to be able to specify the default box alignment for items.

Regarding ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ (or maybe ‘outer’ and ‘inner’) I think the latter as proposed doesn’t match my mental model, which makes me prefer

    +--------X--------------Y--------
  A | justify-outside  align-outside
  B | justify[-self]   align[-self]
  C | justify-inside   align-inside

By the way, are the triples ‘before’/‘after’/‘center’ and ‘start’/‘end’/‘center’ set in stone now? Otherwise I suggest to reconsider using ‘middle’ instead of ‘center’ in the former case.

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2012 13:58:58 UTC