Re: Exposing Fundamental Primitives (was: [css-regions] Named Flows, Elements and Box Generation)

On Monday 2013-10-28 19:46 -0400, Brian Kardell wrote:
> Apologies for delayed response to this thread, feel like i helped instigate
> some of this discussion via other channels and then didn't show up to
> participate when it came up.
> 
> Numerous WG members are of the opinion that we need to, as the Extensible
> Web Manifesto says, prioritize explaining the magic and exposing the
> fundamental primitives in the system.  I won't rehash the rationale for
> this, but encourage you to read it for yourself and the plenty of articles
> written about it.  I will note though that it explicitly states explains
> how this helps us develop better high level apis - that we definitely want
> them.

Regions don't seem anywhere close to a fundamental primitive --
frankly, they're higher-level and more complex than most of the
other formatting concepts exposed by CSS.  Things like
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-regions/#regions-visual-formatting-details
involve substantial complexity (implicitly running algorithms in
other parts of CSS in multiple passes, because of the way flowing
into regions can violate the ordering assumptions of other layout
systems).

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)