Re: [css-flexbox] Renaming flex-basis:auto for less confusion

On 09/24/2014 01:38 PM, fantasai wrote:
> Hi Daniel!
> We discussed this issue at the Sophia F2F two weeks ago.
> We didn't conclude to change anything at the moment, but
> we wrote in the issue and an alternative solution that
> doesn't impact back-compat.

Thanks for the update!

FWIW, I've got a metabug to track back-compat issues (broken web
content), discovered by this implementation-change in Firefox:
 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1057162

So far, I'm only aware of 3 instances of breakage (and all have been
fixed by reaching out to the web developers involved). See the bug
dependencies for more info.

I'm open to the alternative proposal ('auto' for size lookup; 'content'
for automatic sizing), if it ends up being the case that back-compat
issues are too common to fix on a case-by-case basis, though.

~Daniel

 We're going to keep this open
> during the last call period in order to collect feedback
> from implementers (like you).
>   http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-flexbox/#flex-basis-property
> Microsoft also plans to do a back-compat evaluation.
> 
> I think if the change hadn't been implemented already,
> I'd've pushed for the alternative solution, but we wanted
> to be sensitive to where implementations are currently at.
> 
> Here's the full text of the issue:
> 
>   | This value was originally named auto, but that was
>   | problematic because it left us with no keyword to
>   |represent an automatic flex basis. There were two
>   | options for fixing this:
>   |
>   | 'auto' for automatic sizing; 'main-axis' for size lookup
>   |    The advantage of this is primarily that auto means
>   |    “automatic” both when it is specified for 'flex-basis'
>   |    and when it is pulled in from width/height. It has
>   |    the disadvantage (due to back-compat concerns) that
>   |    the 'flex' shorthand had to be tweaked to expand
>   |    'flex: auto' to 'flex: auto main-size' rather than to
>   |    'flex: 1 auto'. It is the currently-implemented option,
>   |    but may be unshippable due to back-compat constraints.
>   |
>   | 
>   |    The advantage of this is that it will not break
>   |    existing content: a flex-basis keyword for automatic
>   |    sizing did not exist in the original CR, so this
>   |    option adds a new keyword but does not rename existing
>   |    functionality. It therefore avoids the
>   |    'flex: auto' ≠ 'flex: 1 auto' inequality.
>   |
>   | The CSSWG is waiting for feedback from implementers on this issue.
> 
> ~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2014 21:01:16 UTC