On Friday 2014-02-14 13:54 +1300, Robert O'Callahan wrote: > On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 1:43 PM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbar...@mit.edu> wrote: > > > On 2/13/14 5:56 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote: > > > >> 2) Fragmentation. With something like overflow:fragments, absolute > >> positioning can affect the number of fragments you generate, which can > >> affect the size of the container of the fragments. > >> > > > > Ugh. I thought one of the points of absolute positioning was to not > > affect the layout of anything.... If that's not the case anymore, that's > > _really_ annoying. > > > Well, I'm not 100% sure. I wonder what David thinks.
Hmm. There's sort of a bit of a conflict between the constraint that absolute positioning not affect layout, and that pagination of absolute positioning produce reasonable results even when the author didn't think about pagination. One of the design principles we often have to use when deciding how things should paginate is that we need pages that were designed without printing in mind to print in a reasonable way. Perhaps this constraint should only be true for actual printing -- and we should make the tradeoffs differently for other forms of pagination (multicol, regions, overflow:fragments). But that would mean even more complexity in a part of the platform that's probably already too complex. I think the Regions spec has the same problem, at least. I'm not convinced that either Regions or overflow:fragments are solving a problem that is important enough to be worth the trouble of solving it, but Adobe has been pushing it very hard, and I wanted to propose a more-CSS-like alternative to regions. If we went with a model where absolute positioning didn't affect external layout at all, I suppose that either: * overflowing absolutely positioned elements would extend out of the last page, region, or column without creating new ones (which would lead to users complaining when they print a page that was entirely absolutely positioned) * alternatively, for columns and pages (but this wouldn't work for regions/fragments), they could create additional overflow columns or additional pages without otherwise affecting layout -David -- 𝄞 L. David Baron http://dbaron.org/ 𝄂 𝄢 Mozilla https://www.mozilla.org/ 𝄂 Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense. - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
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