Posted by Jeremy on 11/28/07 18:56

dorayme wrote:
>
> OK, looks quite clever an attempt. I guess it would be tricky to
> adjust to the surrounding not overlaying the text at the bottom
> (in my FF and Safari) when the font size is upped a notch or two
> by the user?
>
> It fails a bit in Safari, the right vertical col is not clean (it
> is one and a bit 'question boxes' wide. So still not up to Nick's
> js in simple performance. Not yet at any rate. <g>
>
> My swim is coming up soon. Got to go.
>

Yeah - text size adjustment is the least of the problems. The bigger
problem is that you have to calculate for each content box how many
floating squares you need to pad the box out enough. And then - like
you said - it will break if someone has a text size that doesn't mesh
with yours.

I tried this with 32em width and height to account for this (which
theoretically should work to some degree, as the grid boxes will always
be a multiple of 32px IF the font size is an integer) - not only was the
quantization level much too great for it to be useful, but the text size
is apparently NOT always an integral number of pixels (which surprised me).

Anyway, I don't think a CSS solution exists that would be more elegant
than a good Javascript solution. Javascript is great for adding extra
decoration features - as long as it's unobtrusive and gracefully degrades.

Jeremy

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