[css3-gcpm][css3-multicol][css3-regions] page floats, column spans, implemented & revised

James Holderness wrote:

 > > 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.

Great to hear!

 > 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. 

Indeed, the title is a bit scary. However, presentation can also be
"paged" on screen, so this is also within scope of the draft.

 > 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.

[Adding css3-regions & css3-multicol to subject line]

It's an interesting discussions, one I think we should have: which
advanced layout model works best for our various use cases, and for
which definition of "best".

Personally, after having worked on multicol layout for years, I think
it addresses many common use cases when combined with 'overflow:
paged' and 'column-span: <integer>'. 

  http://people.opera.com/howcome/2013/02-reader/

The code is minimal, reusable, and pages are responsive. 

What it doesn't do -- which regions do -- is to offer positioning of
the various boxes; columns are laid out automatically, while regions
are placed manually. I have hopes that we can agree on a model with
the automation that css3-multicol provides, and with the
configurability that css3-regions offers. Here's my attempt at
resolving these:

  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-gcpm/#regions

This way we would also avoid using empty elements as dummy containers
for regions, something which I'm very opposed to. (CSS was created to
save us from tag abuse, not to add to it.)

 > 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

Wow. Clever. In a weird-code kind of way :) 

The use case is the same, so I guess we have full agreement on that. 

Cheers,

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Sunday, 3 March 2013 11:58:26 UTC