Re: Automatic centering and positioning

On Fri, Nov 8, 2013 at 2:40 PM, David Dailey <ddailey@zoominternet.net> wrote:
> Tab wrote:
> ...yet.  Wait for fantasai and I to finally take the time to take over Positioning next year.  I've had Plans for a couple years concerning it.
>
>
> Yes, I am sure that you like many other people have been making plans along these lines for many years. I remember conversations with Cameron about such issues circa 2006. I and others have had much more extensive plans, and at times, implementations, involving pairwise attractors and deflectors, departures from the box model (into various forms of polygonal tessellation), concepts of adjacency and proximity, etc.
>
> I echo Dirk's sentiment that SVG is fundamentally, at the most basic levels of semantics, different from HTML and that simply applying one or another theory of layout as a one size fits all for hypertext and for graphics may be ill-fated.
>
> But ya'll have heard authors yammer about this for years now, so why belabor a point that is likely to be ignored anyhow?
>
> Nevertheless it may be noteworthy to point out, once again, that the separation of meaning, layout and behavior that makes some sort of sense in the context of the H-Text-ML may be a fool's errand in the context of geometry.

CSS is a declarative styling language. While many features of it are
specialized for text and text flow, it is not, itself, specific to
text in any way.  It's just an easier way to apply styling than
spamming attributes or using script.

But this is a tangent, and I"m not particularly interested in getting
into a philosophical argument about the intrinsic semantic differences
between geometry and text, as they're just a distraction from actually
solving problems here.

~TJ

Received on Friday, 8 November 2013 22:43:36 UTC