Re: [css-regions] Named Flows, Elements and Box Generation

On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 3:23 PM, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com> wrote:
> Also sprach Tab Atkins Jr.:
>
>  > I recommend reading the Extensible Web Manifesto
>  > <http://extensiblewebmanifesto.org/>, which I and a lot of other spec
>  > authors and major library developers signed.  It says precisely what I
>  > just did - the correct way to design the web platform, established
>  > through years of experience, is to figure out the low-level primitives
>  > and expose those, then additionally offer high-level sugar that
>  > composes those primitives automatically for you to solve common
>  > problems.
>
> On the ladder of abstraction for document design, regions and flows
> are fairly abstract concepts that depend on lower-level stuff like
> fitting content on a line. If you truly want the low-level stuff, a
> better target is TeX's assembly-language-for-documents-like features.
>
> I grew up with FrameMaker which basically was a software package for
> Regions. I was always envious of the low-level stuff that the TeX guys
> could do.

There are multiple levels of abstraction that one can target.  The
fact that it's possible to go lower doesn't mean that it's not
reasonable to expose something at a given level.

~TJ

Received on Monday, 28 October 2013 22:32:14 UTC