Comments on: Wouldn’t it be nice?

by: Ben Buchanan

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:16:52 +0000

Although not top of my wish list, I can certainly see where this would be useful.

by: InfinitFocus

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 20:48:18 +0000

I love the idea…. As a designer you’re no longer limited to boring CSS layouts…. Dynamic menus are all the same… With this I can have a menu placed in the lower right corner at a 45 degree angle… Just Because I want it there…

And you’re right Adobe uses it… Quark uses it… Why shouldn’t the WEB!!! It’s such a basic function in all programs… Why is it so hard to implement in CSS…

Has anyone even bothered asking Adobe, Quark, or Microsoft if they would open source that basic code to the browser companies???? Why wouldn’t they? Adobe Products are basically for designers… If that’s the case wouldn’t they want their customers to be able to produce the best web design as possible???

Some things should be standard. And this is one of those things….

Keep pushing for it please…

by: Andrew

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:44:48 +0000

Its certainly a great start. Opens up some real creative possibilities for designers. I look on with interest.

by: michael stuhr

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 11:32:12 +0000

I once said “wouldn’t it be cool if every browser would support multi-column layout, I mean not only for p’s?” and then came IE 7 and I realized that we should pray for other things first.

by: CSS Working Group Blog

Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:19:52 +0000

[…] Aaron Gustafson asked last week in an article called “Wouldn’t it be nice?” for rotation of text over arbitrary angles and for wrapping text around non-rectangular floating images. […]

by: Tomas Caspers

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 09:38:28 +0000

What would aliased text look like in any box that is not rotated in right angles?

by: Aaron

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 19:51:58 +0000

Jason: That was my initial inclination, but I was a little concerned that it might be confusing in practice. That said, I would be against them offering multiple ways of indicating it like they do with backgrounds.

by: Jason Querido

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:12:25 +0000

WRT the anchor, I wonder if offset coordinates could be also used in place of the words, similar to positioning background images.
e.g. “0px 0px” instead of “top left”

by: Aaron

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:56:01 +0000

Good catch on the floating thing, Porter (and Jonathan). I meant to have a float rule in the example. As for the rotation while floating, that’s a good point. I’m trying to recall what my thought process was at the time… I believe my initial desire was to see rotation based on the rotation-anchor property (i.e. if rotated from the top left corner, rotation would be up and left from there if negative; if from the center, it would rotate around the center). It is a tricky thing for sure, especially when you begin to consider the bounding box, as Jonathan brings up. I think this is something we need to talk more about. Should an element’s box rotate with the element, or should it act kinda like relative positioning and leave its box untouched? That’s where the polygonal margins would come in handy.

Back to rotation-anchor for a moment, I would argue very much in favor of that property because it can be a very useful tool for precise rotation of an object. Yes, it does introduce some crazy math for calculating and laying out images and such, but programs like Photoshop and Quark have been doing this for years.

As for the polygonal margins, I understand where you’re coming from Kevin, but this is also the sort of thing which has been done for years in Quark, Pagemaker, and InDesign. It can’t be rocket science. Perhaps a member of the W3C might even be willing to open source the calculations to allow browser vendors to implement it more easily. Plus, If we are already considering more involved layouts and text flows with the Advanced Layout Module in CSS 3, it seems only reasonable to add this option as well. Otherwise, I imagine folks will start to corrupt Advanced Layout make it work (return of the spacer GIF, anyone?).

By no means am I assuming these ideas are perfect, but I’d like to see the folks on the ground discussing these sorts of enhancements more (rather than just leaving it to the folks at the W3C). I think to some degree, we should be letting them know what we want and how we’d like to see it implemented.

Thank you all for your comments. Keep ‘em coming!

by: Malarkey

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:41:10 +0000

As I said to you when I first saw this in January, I think that your ideas have real legs and I hope that the CSS WG give them the attention they deserve as they would help designers using CSS a great deal.

I also think that your considered approach to suggesting additions and new specifications is exactly the right one. Very cool work mate!