Re: [css-display] Unofficial draft of a Display spec ready for consumption

On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 2:55 PM, Andrew Fedoniouk
<news@terrainformatica.com> wrote:
> 'display-box'  either 'normal' or 'none'
> sounds misleading for inline elements. They have no box to hide or to
> show normally.

Inline elements generate boxes.

> We already have 'visibility' property so why do we need more?
> We just need to add new value like visibility:excluded to define
> display:none effect.

Possible, sure, but display:none is already part of the 'display'
property, so we have to handle it in the longhands *somehow*.  Plus,
this is very familiar to authors.  Third, display:contents is clearly
related to display:none, but not clearly related to visibility.
Finally, visibility is already well-established as just being a visual
effect - it still causes things to generate boxes, while display:none
does not, so 'visibility' isn't a great fit for the functionality.

> And it is good to hear that you finally started to speak about
> "layout mode" (layout method, layout manager, etc. in classic UI sense).

We've used the term "layout mode" for a long time.  My blog post with
the sketch of this is 2 1/2 years old, and I've been complaining about
the issue for longer than that.  Finally, Bert wrote up the first
version of this ('display-model' and 'display-role') in Template
Layout even before I came into the group.

> But I am not sure I understand how your split will be backward compatible.
> Something tells me that it is not.

I don't understand.  The 'display' property explicitly handles all of
the legacy values appropriately.  There's nothing else to be
compatible with.

~TJ