Re: [css-writing-modes-3] Defer auto-muticol behavior in Auto-sizing Block Containers in Orthogonal Flows

On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 9:47 AM, Koji Ishii <kojiishi@gmail.com> wrote:
> What I'm suggesting here is for UA not to handle the overflow in block
> direction automatically and forcibly.
>
> Was this point clear?

I'm not sure what you mean by this, so no. ^_^  Let me restate what
the behavior in question is:

When you have orthogonal flows, such as vertical Japanese text in an
English document, if you're not careful with sizing you can easily get
horrible behavior.  Without an explicit height, the line-length of the
Japanese is unconstrained, and will lay out similar to max-content,
requiring people to scroll down to read each line and then back up to
read the next.  As well, if the text is long enough, the lines will
stack off the screen horizontally, creating a "T-shaped" document.
Horizontal scrolling in a primarily-vertical page is very frustrating.

Automatically applying multicol with some constraints fixes both of
these problems.  By setting a column-width of the screen height, lines
won't span longer than the screen, so you can read more comfortably.
(Screen height might not be the ideal line length, but at least you
don't have to scroll back and forth to read; it's a minimum viable
fix-up.)  By using multicol, when there are enough lines to overflow
the width of the element they instead create a new column downward, so
the document stays vertically-scrollable only.

This behavior causes orthogonal content to conform to the document's
overall flow-direction preferences, avoiding user-hostile behavior,
particularly when an author tests only with short spans of content but
in production the content is sometimes long.

Is there anything in this you object to?

~TJ

Received on Friday, 29 May 2015 21:43:47 UTC