[css-shapes] Comments on CSS Shapes Module Level 1, 10 Sept Editors Draft

The following comments are on the 10 September Editor's draft

1.       Renaming suggestion: Because Floats have traditionally had an area that corresponds to the outer (margin) box of the float and this specification changes that. I feel strongly that it would be better to talk about the "float exclusion area" rather than the "float area" because the latter term is ambiguous and easily confused with the area of the float box.

2.       In Definitions, beside the definition of float (exclusion) area, there should be a definition of what it means to "wrap" text. There are two aspects to this: (a) which side(s) of the exclusion shape are wrapped and (b) how close to the exclusion shape should start (or end) edge of a line of text be place. That is, should it be the line start (end) should be positioned so that one point on the line touches the outside of the shape and no part of the line box is inside the shape?

3.       It would be useful to have an example which shows that text does not wrap around (on both sides of) an float exclusion shape, but only goes to the right of the shape in left floats and the left of the shape in right floats.

4.     Example 3, This example would be clearer to me if it began: "Since only the area of the shape is excluded, a shape..."

5.       In Example 4, replace "content area" with "float box content area that is outside the shape" Similarly, "margin area" should be "margin area of the float box".

Replace the last sentence with, "The inline content affected by the float is only excluded from the area occupied by shape (wraps up to the shape) and otherwise overlays the rest of the float margin box."

6.       In the paragraph introducing the second case in Example 4, It would be useful to point out that float collision avoidance  is still based on the margin boxes of the two "colliding" floats and not their float exclusion areas.

7.       In the specification for "inset-rectangle" the term "inset" is unclear. In CSS 2.1, 'top', 'right', 'bottom', 'left' are referred to as "box offsets" Replace the first sentence of the first bullet with, "The first four values represent the top, right, bottom and left offsets from the content rectangle inward that define the positions of edges of the inset rectangle  (Similarly, the term "bounding rectangle" should be replaced in the specification for "rectangle".)

8.       In Figure 1 in Shapes from Images, "shape-margin" has not yet been defined and seems to add nothing important to this example so it should not be used here. The figure as is could be used in the Shape Margin section.

9.       The definition of the shape defined by applying the "shape-margin" property needs to be refined. For example the shape is the smallest contour (in the shrink-wrap sense) that includes all the points that are the shape-margin distance outward in the perpendicular direction from a point on the underlying shape. Note that at points where a perpendicular is not defined (e.g. sharp points) take all points on the circle centered at the point and with a radius of shape-margin.

10.   Since the default value of the "shape-margin" property is zero, this should say, "This property takes only non-negative values."

Steve Zilles