[css-multicol] can overflow content influence column height?

An issue come up today in a discussion with a seasoned multicol
implementer: does overflow content influence column height?

Consider a multicol element with two columns, and column breaks after
each paragraph:

  article { columns: 2; background: yellow }
  p { break-after: column }

Then you pour three <p> elements into the <article>: two one-liners
and then one long paragraph (say, 10 lines). What's the resulting
height of the article? 1 or 10 lines (disregarding padding for a
moment).

I can see two alternatives:

(1) the multicol element is made high enough to fit all columns. In
this case, there will be three columns: two with one line each, and a
third column -- outside the multicol element -- with 10 lines. The
yellow box will be high enough to fit the third column, even if it
shown outside the multicol element.

(2) the multicol element is made high enough to fit all columns that
end up inside the box. So there will be two columns with one line of
text each inside the multicol element, and then there will be 10
overflow columns outside.

I think I have a slight preference for (2).

Implementations vary, and it's hard to test as not all support
explicit column breaks.

Comments welcome.

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

Received on Monday, 14 October 2013 17:38:07 UTC