Re: [css-gcpm] Footnotes as Regions

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 6:42 PM, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com> wrote:

> I'd be reluctant to change the syntax; we have two interoperable
> shipping implementations that support the current GCPM syntax.
>
>   http://www.wiumlie.no/2014/tests/books/footnotes-ah.pdf
>   http://www.wiumlie.no/2014/tests/books/footnotes-pr.pdf
>   http://books.spec.whatwg.org/#footnotes
>
>
That's certainly a concern. But the implementations are not quite
interoperable now. Prince uses @footnotes, and AntennaHouse (and GCPM) use
@footnote. The various float values also differ (things like
prince-column-inline-footnote).  If a different syntax turns out to have
advantages, perhaps the existing implementations could map the old syntax
to the new. But we are getting ahead of ourselves!

One motivation for an alternate approach is that the current syntax is hard
to extend. The example of two footnote streams in CSS Books [1] uses float:
footnote and @footnote for one of the streams, and @area and flow: area()
for the other stream. The regions syntax feels like it will be easier to
extend to many situations--footnotes, sidenotes, pull quotes, and all sorts
of things.

Best regards,

Dave


[1]
http://books.spec.whatwg.org/#flowing-content-into-named-areas:-area%28%29