Posted by dorayme on 12/19/07 18:54

In article <slrnfmhk5s.fqo.spamspam@bowser.marioworld>,
Ben C <spamspam@spam.eggs> wrote:

> The purpose of block formatting contexts is floats, they aren't relevant
> to anything else that I can see. They might have been named "float
> contexts" instead, perhaps less confusingly.

OK. So when I am thinking and saying things like containers are
normally blind to their floated children, except for some IE
family containers (which auto grow height for them), I will be
adding that there is an official way to cause parents to see
their floated children, namely to trigger a BFC. An author can
always specify a height: but this "covering of the children" is
mere forcing the blind parent to provide something, it shows no
inner awareness (as it were) of the floated children. However, an
author giving the container a BFC gives the parent a more inner
intelligence, an awareness that can fend for itself, in effect,
it covers its floated children all by itself once the author has
triggered some genes in it...

Just thinking aloud...

> > I am thinking of ditching a lot of stuff about browser
> > differences, these differences simply take up all of one's time!
>
> Yes, good plan. That's a separate document (to put off writing until
> people have stopped using IE anyway). Although you might want to make
> brief mention of the Firefox/IE7 shared non-conformance of always
> putting floats in the next line if there are any inlines preceding them,
> since that's quite a big one.
>

And, of course, there is the ever present danger in these things
that I don't know what browser a reader might be using to read my
efforts. So some stuff about browsers will be inevitable

> > I wish the W3C had made their own browser to follow their own
> > standards.
>
> I think that's what Amaya was meant to be, but it is hopeless at
> following the standards getting basic things completely wrong. The
> authoring tool side of it is said to be not bad however if you like that
> kind of thing.
>
> > Then everyone would see at a glance how IE and Safari and FF measure
> > up to the standard.
>
> Certainly a proper reference implementation would be good. For one thing
> it would prove whether it was actually possible.

I like this thought of yours. Damn good one, is it really
possible to follow the standards as written? It may not be. (In
fact, it is *probably not possible* under some rigid
interpretation <g>).

--
dorayme

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