Re: Can we have more maths in calc()?

On Sun, 2014-04-06 at 21:26 +0200, Vasilis van Gemert wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The last few days I’ve been playing with ratios to define layouts and
> font-sizes, as explained in this recent article on A List Apart:
> http://alistapart.com/article/content-out-layout

The article is not bad, although the ratio stuff is rather flawed
because it doesn't take margins/gutters into account.

Note that most attempts to do something similar with type sizes result
in spectacularly ugly results. You don't generally need larger sizes of
type for headings.

I agree about more functions being useful - for DSSSL years ago we added
(on my request I think) square roots and a couple of trigonometric
functions exactly for calculating page size ratios, for example using
the medieval constructs rediscovered by Jan Tschicholde.

> We could write something like this:
> 
> div {
>     flex: calc(1.414 pow7) 1 calc(1.414px pow7);
> }

Although that's nice and compact, pow(1.414, 7) might be better when you
need to compose functions -
  calc( sqrt( sin( var( copywidth ) ) * var( pi ) * var( pageheight ) )
might be clearer than however you'd do it without the parens :)

The possibility of functions implemented in JavaScript seems not
unreasonable, too, e.g. to get access to the viewport size, or, via the
camera, the user's hair colour.

Liam

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Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
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