Re: CSS Regions considered harmful (was: [css-regions] issue 16858 redux)

On Thu, 2014-01-23 at 02:06 +0100, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> Liam R E Quin wrote:
> 
>  > >  For me, the separation of style from
>  > > structure one of the foundations CSS stands on. Probably THE
>  > > foundation. So I don't think we should break that priciple, even if it
>  > > seems convenient to do so.
>  > 
>  > How does this square with, for example, putting two h1 elements in a
>  > document so you can use element() to take one out as a running header?
> 
> Generally, I'd use strings to set running headers.

That works fine if the content is simple, not if there are sub-elements
(e.g. you are formatting a book of mathematical papers).

[...]

> If the running header has structure (e.g., if there's an <em>
> element inside the header), one has two option:
> 
>  - duplicate the content and use the element() function. 
> 
>       http://books.spec.whatwg.org/#running-elements
> 
> I don't think this is tag abuse,
It's not mis-using an element (tag abuse) but it's an example of adding
markup to the document for formatting.


>  but being able to clone the document
> may still appeal to some. A solution for this is sketched here, in the
> copy() function:
> 
>   http://books.spec.whatwg.org/#cloning,-fixing-and-clearing-elements-in-named-areas
> 
> This is still early work.

[[
Move an element to a named area, and make it sticky, so that it is shown
on succeeding pages, until erased:

h1.copy { float: to(sidenote, fill, stick) }
]]

is neither very declarative :-) nor very clear. But I don't want to
start discussion of whatwg specs here, this isn't the place.

I do agree that named areas are a good idea; both CSS regions and CSS
grids move in this direction.

>  > Isn't the answer here templates + regions?
> 
> What would the code look like?

I don't (yet) have an answer to that either I'm afraid, because I think
the work that's needed is aligning grids, templates and regions with
some of the gcpm stuff.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org freenode/#xml

Received on Thursday, 23 January 2014 04:52:42 UTC