On 03/04/2013 22:28, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: > While trying to edit today's telcon decision into Flexbox, we realized > that "pseudo-stacking context" isn't actually defined anywhere. We > then noted it was a terrible name for the concept. I introduced the term as a tongue-in-cheek way to draw attention to the fact that a fairly important concept existed in CSS21 without a name to refer to it by! In my treatment of stacking in CSS21 which became the infamous Issue 60 on the old wiki issues list, I actually used other terms, my preferred one at the time being "painting context" (so every stacking context is a painting context, but not vice versa). (My original request to define this term for CSS21 was rejected, incidentally ;-) > After some brainstorming between us and some coworkers, we've come up > with these suggestions: > > 1. Rename "stacking context" to "z-layer container". The current term > "stacking context" isn't very clear - invoking "stacking" doesn't > suggest what is being stacked in any way. The new name uses "layer", > which *is* a term used more often by normal people when talking about > these concepts, and it includes a reference to "z", because it > traps/orders things using "z-index". > > 2. Rename "pseudo-stacking context" to "flow-layer container". It > only contains flow-level stuff (blocks, floats, inlines), so this > seems appropriate, and has nice parallel structure to the "z-layer > container" term. > > The spec should still define "stacking context" as a synonym for > "z-layer container", so references into the spec still make sense. I'm not thrilled by any of these, to be honest. Although the term "context" is used a fair bit in CSS without there being any concrete definition of what it's supposed to mean, I suppose we've all developed a feeling for it. I do think "context" is better than "container" because when dealing with painting/stacking contexts its often not the ancestor-descendant relationship that's interesting; rather it's the participation. Which is why phrases like "participates in a stacking context" are often used. Cheers, AntonReceived on Thursday, 4 April 2013 18:03:10 UTC
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