Re: [css-flexbox] Behaviour of percentage heights in column direction

Specifically, I'm curious about this scenario:
  http://jsfiddle.net/2jftbvyk/
(Basically, we have a vertical flex item with a percent-height child,
and which derives its min-content height from a tall grandchild.)

UNCONTROVERSIAL: The flex item there -- bordered in orange -- should end
up at 200px (taller than its black-bordered parent), because
"min-height:auto" prevents it from being smaller than its blue
fixed-height grandchild.

CONTROVERSIAL:
The question is, should that (orange) flex item's height be considered
"definite"?

According to flexbox section 9.8 #2, the answer is "no" -- it's not
definite -- the flex item happens to have a non-definite flex-basis
(from "flex: 0 1 auto"), which means its final flexed height is not
considered definite.

But, the interesting part: if we happen to give it "flex: 0 1 0px" (or
even "flex: 0 1 100px") instead, then it will *still* end up at a height
of 200px (again, from min-width:auto). BUT, now the spec says that final
height SHOULD be considered definite, for some reason -- simply because
we started at (and immediately discarded) a definite flex-basis.

This inconsistency doesn't make sense to me, though I don't think I have
a concrete suggestion for improvement yet.

~Daniel

On 02/09/2015 01:43 PM, Daniel Holbert wrote:
> On 07/01/2014 09:53 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> fantasai and I discussed this this morning.  Based on that discussion,
>> and the telcon discussion we had last week, we agree with the
>> conclusions of this thread.  Namely, percentage heights on children of
>> flex items should be resolveable if the item's 'flex-basis' is
>> definite; they resolve against the *flexed height* of the flex item
>> (not its flex-basis directly).
> [...]
>>
>> (There's still the issue of what happens when the item freezes due to
>> a min-height violation based on its min-content size, but that's a
>> more general issue than just Flexbox, and we've started a separate
>> thread on that.)
> 
> Hi Tab,
> 
> Do you know where this separate thread (which you mentioned having
> started, in the parenthetical here) ended up?
> 
> I looked at https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Jul/ and
> https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Jun/ , and I saw
> several threads about min-height/min-width, but it's not clear to me
> which one (if any) actually ended up considering the question of whether
> a "min-content"-clamped flex item should be considered as having a
> definite height, for the purpose of resolving percent heights on its
> children.
> 
> Thanks,
> ~Daniel
>

Received on Monday, 9 February 2015 21:58:36 UTC