[sclug] CSS

[Jonathan Leighton]

On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 19:05 +0100, David Given wrote:
> Unfortunately, CSS is the only game in town if you want web pages. (I 
> periodically wonder about how feasible it would be to do your layout using 
> Javascript to modify the HTML code, which ought to let you do things that CSS 
> can't do, but nothing ever comes of it.)

That would -- of course -- be completely and utterly inaccessible. And
it's not what Javascript is for anyway.

You seem to want CSS to allow you to create print result. The web is not
a print medium. This is why CSS behaves the way it does. I recommend
reading this: http://www.grauw.nl/articles/css-faq.php

Things you wanted:

"element X to be the same size as element Y" -- prevents incremental
rendering

"element X to be wide enough to contain a particular string without
wrapping" -- of course this depends on the font size doesn't it?
However, what you want could possibly be achieved with an em-sized font
inside an em-sized box. Then they would resize in line with each other.

"that you want an element to have three children, one of which is n
pixels wide, and the rest of the space should be divided equally between
the other children" -- probably possible, at least with CSS3. Can't say
without trying though

"most CSS-based column layouts end up having to make some of the columns
a fixed size simply to make them work properly" -- no, most fixed width
CSS layouts are that way because one or more images are used that would
look stupid if the rest of the page was wider than the image. Fluid CSS
layouts are perfectly possible.

"Other layouts just use CSS table rendering to duplicate the
functionality of the <TABLE> tag, which is cheating..." -- Using the
table *ELEMENT* for layout is cheating; it's non-semantic and messy.
Besides, I haven't actually seen any of these layouts you mention.

-- 
Jonathan Leighton
http://turnipspatch.com/ | http://digital-proof.org/