Re: [css-gcpm-4]

> On Nov 23, 2014, at 7:12 PM, Dave Cramer <dauwhe@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> We've started thinking along those lines in a very rough sketch of GCPM4 [1].

Cool. One thing I have is to consume the whole flow by using the flow name within the 'content' property. That would allow you to combine it with other things, including strings and counters.

'Flow-persist' doesn't feel quite right to me. Each page margin box is just a single region, and the contents should just automatically persist across pages until it is changed by the page contents (using flow-into or copy-into or whatever, combined with flow-from or 'content'.). For other things that need to persist elsewhere across pages, 'position: fixed' in a page template should do it.

I also like where you are going with footnotes and page templates. In fact, I almost feel like the two drafts should be combined. GCPM4 is not that much about generated content any more. Maybe just call it paged media 4. But anyway, flowing into slots was also what I had in mind. 

In templates, the slots are chained regions that can continue footnote text on the page, which I think is good, but if all footnote areas are a region chain, then perhaps 'flow-from-policy: add' or something could be used to let 'flow-from' add the page's footnotes to whatever was already there from a previous page. There also needs to be a way to say that the flow of the new footnotes should start on a page no earlier than the page it is flowing from.

I would get rid of the need for nested spans around the footnote like this: create a new pseudo-element, ::flowed-from, that gets left behind whenever 'flow-into' removes all other content. It would exist whenever it had content, such as a counter. So you would have this for your example 4:
span.footnote::before { content: counter(footnote) '. '; }
span.footnote::flowed-from { content: counter(footnote); font-variant-position: super; }