On 23 Feb 2005, at 09:49, John Allsopp wrote:
John,
What I want is the ability to align the content of a DIV, for instance, or any block element, vertically, and I'm asking why it wasn't included in CSS-1.
I can't think of any policy-type reason why it wasn't, that's all, and I don't see vertical alignment as being directly related to table-cell display either.
I think you want the 'display-align' property from XSL:FO. http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html#area-alignment
Unfortunately, it's not available in CSS 1, 2, 2.1 or 3 (yet?). It will be available in SVG 1.2 (we added a new property before realising that XSL:FO had already done it "the right way").
I wouldn't be surprised if Bert gave a reason as to why 'display-align' will not be in CSS.
I can't speak for Hakon Lie or Bert Bos but...
The original proposal was taking shape in 95/95, really before the abomination of tables for layout had ruined the web :-)
So I'm guessing that it simply wasn't something everyone wanted to do, like it is now.
Ditto multi column layout f'rinstance.
Yeah! Wouldn't it have been fantastic to have a real multi-column, grid-like layout mechanism? (It probably *still* would be fantastic to have one :).
It would also be nice to bind an HTML element to a particular cell in the layout, allowing the author to order the source in the most appropriate manner and not resort to floats and abs positioning to achieve the layout they desire.
Maybe Bert will have an answer :-)
In my experience Bert always has the answer, and if I notice I disagree with him then that's usually first step towards realising I'm wrong :)
Dean
****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/
See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
