On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 7:03 PM, Andrew Fedoniouk <ne...@terrainformatica.com <mailto:ne...@terrainformatica.com>> wrote:

Robert O'Callahan wrote:

What does that have to do with absolute positioning and http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visudet.html#abs-non-replaced-width ?

There is nothing special with this in respect of flexes. Or I do not understand your question.

You calculate positions of elements including flexes. After that you will have "would-be-position"s of absolute elements and you replace them accordingly to their left...bottom attributes.

Is this what you were asking?

No. The rules in that section describe how to size and position an absolutely positioned element based on the values of its margin, padding, border and content size properties. Those rules do not consider flexunit values. You need to explain how the rules are extended to handle flexunit values. Are they just treated as auto?

A few more questions about flex-units:

Does 'flow' apply to inline elements? If so, what does 'flow:vertical' do on an inline element?

As I said flow is applicable only to elements that establish boxes - so to create bounds for flex length distribution. Inlines are clearly not such blocks.

That's confusing. In CSS all rendered elements create boxes. Your explanation that 'flow' only applies to elements that are block-inside makes more sense.

How do flexunits work on inline elements that break across multiple lines? e.g <span style="font-size:50px;">Foo</span> <span style="padding-top:1*">A<br>B<br>C</span> <span style="font-size:80px;">qux</span> Which line box(es) are used to determine the padding? Does each line of the <span> actually get a different padding?

Flex units are defined only for blocks and block-alike elements. display: block | inline-block | table | table-cell | etc.

Hang on, you just said that 'flow' only applies to elements with block layout inside, so why does it make sense to apply flex units to table-cell?

inline elements have no concept of dimension. In the same way as width:100px does not work for inline elements in the same way flex length units do not work there either.

But padding does work for inline elements, so one might expect flexunits padding to work on them too. In fact here http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2008Jun/0043.html I asked a question that assumed inline elements could have flex padding and you agreed.

How do flexunits interact with absolute positioning and auto top/left? Is the hypothetical position for the content computed taking flexunit margins/padding on the content into account?

Yes.

I mean, given <div style="flow:vertical; position:relative; height:200px; overflow:auto;"> Hello <div style="margin:1*; position:absolute;"></div> Kitty </div> The position of the inner div is computed "assuming it was in the flow" according to CSS2.1. Does that mean you have to compute the space that would be assigned to the flex margin if the inner div was in-flow?

Here is a screenshot if you wish: http://terrainformatica.com/htmlayout/images/css-menus.png

Nice example, but it doesn't illustrate my question since the abs-pos element doesn't have flexunits on it.

By the way, you probably should have a close look at your decision to make block descendants of an element with 'flow' all block formatting contexts. That means that margin collapsing never happens across the boundaries of these blocks, so the discussion we had earlier about margin-collapsing and flex-units is moot. That's probably a good step but apparently that's not what you've implemented. You probably should also work out more precisely what you mean by that restriction to make it clear exactly which blocks are affected and how.

I hope I've convinced you by now that there is a lot that a flexunits spec needs to say, and what it should say is not all obvious.