Re: [css3-multicol] overflow inside multicol elements

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 9:24 AM, David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com> wrote:

> This is my concern yes. In WebKit right now, far and away the most common
> use case for our multi-column layout implementation is for pagination of
> content that was not necessarily authored with the intent of being
> displayed in columns. The most prominent example of course is iBooks on the
> iPad. In that particular case it was iBook's decision to paginate
> horizontally. The authors of the EPUBs are of course agnostic regarding the
> pagination direction, and so having rendering of EPUBS change across
> devices just because the pagination direction happens to be horizontal is
> pretty strange.
>

In Gecko we use the same pagination rules for printing as we use for
columns; we never use visual slicing. I guess this means some pages with
transforms and relative positioning could lose content when printing, but
I'm not aware of any bugs filed on that and a cursory search didn't turn up
any.

So I would propose standardizing the Firefox/IE/Opera behavior for columns
as well as printing. Then, if necessary, provide authors with a mechanism
to opt into a visual slicing approach (preferably one that works with
<iframe>). This mechanism could also be used by the UA for printing if it
determines that a particular document is losing content (I guess that's
your option #5).

What I don't want to see, however, is content paginating wildly differently
> just because the content is paginated vertically instead of horizontally,
> or because you are displaying two pages on-screen instead of one.


Agree.


> Note there are also sites like onswipe that are producing paginated
> content of existing Web sites as well, e.g., for the iPad. Again this is a
> case of somebody else's content being turned into a multi-column layout.
>

If I understand that site and the iBooks case correctly, although it's
"someone else's content" there is a relationship between the content author
and the app, so it would be possible to send feedback saying "don't do
that", right?

It would be interesting to know if there's any existing iBook content that
would be broken by moving to the Firefox/IE/Opera behavior.

Rob
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