Re: [css-multicol] column-width bound (>0) is illegal

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Kang-Hao (Kenny) Lu
<kanghaol@oupeng.com> wrote:
> (2013/10/16 1:46), Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Morten Stenshorne <mstensho@opera.com> wrote:
>>> "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Are there similar problems in other specs, and are there any solutions
>>> out there already that can be of inspiration?
>>
>> Yes, there are a number of places where the natural range for some
>> value is open, and we've patched it into being closed.  If the error
>> preventing me from editting the wiki is fixed, I'll have a nice
>> write-up with these solutions.
>>
>> The three solutions we've used are:
>>
>> 1. define a minimum size, and clamp things that are within the
>> boundary but less than the minimum.
>
> Which CSS property does this?

I'm not sure if any do this yet, but it's a reasonable behavior.

>> 2. find the limit behavior, and say that below a ua-specific limit,
>> it's just that limit behavior.  (Repeating gradients do this.)
>> 3. define a completely different behavior for the boundary value
>> itself.  (background-size/repeat do this.)
>
> 2. makes the most sense to me and I wonder why we didn't do the average
> color thing for 'background-size: 0'.

Probably because it seems expensive, but mostly because we didn't have
this rule established as firmly in the past.

> I am inclined to think we should do 2. here too, even if it might be
> arbitrarily slow (is that the concern here?).
>
> Or we can as well just say 'column-width: 0' has to be valid but the
> behaivor is implementation-defined.

This seems worse than defining a reasonable behavior.

> Authors should be able to do
> whatever he/she wants in 1px x 1px and scale it up with CSS transform
> without seeing quantum effects.

While an admirable goal, rounding and precision issues guarantee that
this won't be true - the browser environment is inherently quantum (in
at least two cases, quantized to 1/60 of a px).  Due to this, I don't
feel terrible strongly about trying to do anything that would keep
things precise *if* browsers had infinite precision.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 15 October 2013 18:57:17 UTC