Re: [css-multicol][css-flexbox] column-fill + flex

On Wed, Feb 17, 2016 at 12:08 PM, Lea Verou <lea@verou.me> wrote:
> I don’t usually relay my personal CSS frustrations to this list, but I think
> I might have stumbled on a spec bug (and if not, certainly on a browser bug)
> and I’m not familiar enough with the layout specs to exhaustively check
> which of the two it is. Check my reduced testcase here [1] in both Blink &
> Gecko. There are several issues there:
>
> 1. column-fill is not applied when the height is controlled via flex, but
> only if set explicitly in an absolute unit.

Browser bug in Blink.  There's no reason for column-fill to be ignored.

(I don't think there's any bug around this in Gecko, is there? I don't
see one from your testcase, at least.)

> 2. When no height is set, Gecko is not applying multicol whereas Blink is
> (just without column-fill: auto).

Gecko is acting correctly. It *is* applying multicol, it's just only
filling the first column, because you told it to fill sequentially and
then didn't limit the height, so it can just put everything in the
first column and never break.  Notice that in a sufficiently wide
window there's still 2 or more columns, it's just that all but the
first are empty.

> Am I missing something here? I don’t see any such restrictions on [2].
> In any case, I thought the use case could be of interest, as I don’t recall
> many discussions about the combination of multicol & flex.

Multicol shouldn't be all that interesting here; it *should* have a
fairly well-defined and simple interaction with Flexbox.

It looks like the problem is just that Blink auto-balances the columns
unless the multicol has a definite height, which is incorrect
behavior.  It does this in all situations, not just Flexbox.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 17 February 2016 21:05:49 UTC