Re: [css-round-display] Positioning elements with polar positioning and absolute positioning

> On Dec 24, 2015, at 02:06, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
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>> On Dec 22, 2015, at 1:16 AM, Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net> wrote:
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>> 'Polar-origin' and 'center' sort of do the same thing. But 'center' is also meant to be used with T/R/B/L. I'm not sure if that's useful, complicating things, or both.
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>> left: 50px; right: 50px; width: 100px; center-x: 0;
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> Check my proposal again. Only my last alternative used 'center'. 'center' would be ignored if top, right, bottom, or left were not 'auto'. 'Center-x' would be ignored if 'left' or 'right' were not auto. So in the example above, 'center-x' would be ignored. 


Sorry, I had missed that. In that case, the differences between center and polar-origin boil down to:

* center can be used without polar

* "center" is a more obvious name when you're using it without polar positioning, but is a confusing name if you're using it with polar positioning and in especially if you're also using polar-anchor

* polar-origin's initial value is "center", which only does anything if polar positioning is used. What is center's initial value (sorry, I'm sure you said it in a previous mail)? Presumably auto, which has no effect if polar positioning is not used, and could be made to compute to center if polar-positioning is used?

I think one of the things this makes me wonder about is whether this will make it easier for people who would be using absolute positioning anyway to center things, or whether this will cause people who want to center things to do so using absolute positioning. The later is probably not desirable, for the usual reasons: absolute positioning deals poorly with overflow and collisions, which are bound to happen when displaying the content in various environments the author had not anticipated.

The same argument can be made about polar positioning in general, but we do not have, either in existing css or as an alternative proposal, a layout mechanism that accomplishes what polar positioning does AND deals with collisions and overflow. If we did, I would most likely support that instead of polar positioning (makes me think that maybe we should re-explore the idea of a "circular flex" model suggested a while back by LG).

 - Florian

Received on Thursday, 24 December 2015 01:18:19 UTC