Re: [gcpm] page floats, column spans, implemented & revised

> In our quest for newspaper- and magazine-like layout in CSS -- both on
> paper and screens -- some milestones have been reached. By combining
> multicol layout with page floats, some amazingly beautiful, scalable
> and responsive pages can be built.

Having spent the past year or so working with newspapers and magazines on 
exactly this problem (for mobile devices), this is very encouraging to see. 
Up to now we've been hacking a solution with a combination of multicol and 
regular floats to produce similar layouts, but obviously not nearly as 
powerful or as easily implemented as your demonstration.

When I first saw the GCPM spec, I was under the impression that it was 
essentially for printed output only - the whole "Paged Media" thing in the 
title put me off. I'm glad to see that the plan is for this to be usable in 
browsers (and thus webviews). I thought in the long term we would be moving 
towards something like the CSS Regions Module, but I suspect this is much 
closer to our needs.

And in case you're interested, I recently wrote a blog post on some of the 
tricks we've been using in our implementation.
http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2013/02/columned-layouts

While we've made every attempt to be browser agnostic, it's worth mentioning 
that the examples in that post won't work on Opera's Presto engine, which 
appears to handle floats differently to everybody else.

Regards
James

Received on Thursday, 28 February 2013 21:37:09 UTC