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



On 10/28/13 5:02 PM, "Tab Atkins Jr." <jackalmage@gmail.com> wrote:

>On Mon, Oct 28, 2013 at 4:56 PM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
>> 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).
>
>One can disagree about what level you have to go to in order to reach
>"fundamental", but that's not relevant here.
>
>Regions, or at least something very similar to them, are clearly the
>primitive underlying Multicol and some of the more exotic Page
>features.

My understanding of 'fundamental' here is that it's not meant to imply
'simple', 'basic' or 'atomic'. As Håkon pointed out, laying out individual
lines could be thought of as a fundamental operation, too. But from
line-height to font fallback, hyphenation, spacing, orientation etc. it's
not so trivial a task.

Received on Tuesday, 29 October 2013 00:22:00 UTC