Re: [css-inline] Floats and Initial Letters

On Wed, 10 Dec 2014 18:08:37 -0800 fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:

> Dave Cramer and I just finished all the outstanding edits on initial letters.
\o/

> We thought it makes the most sense for floats to automatically clear the
> initial letter, rather than the alternative options we thought of
>    * being between the initial letter and the rest of the text
No, that's no good

>    * being somehow pushed through the initial letter to the containing block
>      edge (and thereby shift the initial letter further into the containing
>      block).

I think this may be right.

Consider e.g. an image of an open double quote floated left,

[ “ ] A F T E R  the fire came a still
     A A     and soft voyce.  And when
    A _ A    Eliiah heard it, he couer-
    A   A    ed his face with his mant-
    el and went out, and stoode in the
    entring of þe caue: and behold,...

> We're not 100% sure if this is the right behavior for floats that happen to
> be on the first line, however, since in that case the second behavior is
> less of a problem. (It makes more sense and doesn't create loops.)

A float in the middle, e.g. with markup just after "voyce" in my example, I think could either come after the initial letter, yes, or between that letter and the text, making the effective text line length smaller (in this example it'd displace "Eliiah"). But if the float was more than one line high it would then cause a gap under the initial, so it would be better to move it down. Hmm, I'm not going to draw these with ASCII art :-)

Would it make more sense to give the author control of this by considering the initial to be an obstruction in the sense of the "clear" property?

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Thursday, 11 December 2014 03:04:18 UTC