[css-regions] Breaking regions into fragments (issue 15189)

Hey all,

There was a thread last year [1] that resulted in issue 15189 [2] in the
regions spec. The question is whether region boxes can themselves be
fragmented. The discussion ended then with the idea that region boxes
should be breakable (as in printing a region that's too tall to fit on a
page), but there are some as-yet-unanswered questions about reflowing
content and possible CSSOM adaptations to the idea.

I propose that we define a very simple fragmenting mechanism for CSS
Regions. The region box and its associated fragment should break as if it
were a simple div containing the fragment contents. So if the fragment
contents themselves have break opportunities, then the region box can
break. This can be controlled by using an avoid break value on the region,
if that is desired.

This means that there is no content reflow in the basic region breaking
case. If you have two side-by-side regions that overlap a printed page
boundary, content will run in the first region from page to page, then in
the second region from page to page. If there is a scenario where you want
content reflow (or container resizing) to occur when printing, you would
need to use a higher-level pagination feature like multicol or page
templates.

Given this simple fragmenting mechanism, I do not think any changes would
need to be made to the regions CSSOM.

Thanks,

Alan

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Oct/0625.html
[2] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=15189

Received on Thursday, 4 October 2012 00:35:19 UTC