[whatwg] Progressive rendering

[Michel Fortin]

Just an update on my previous footnote markup proposal. Håkon Wium  
Lie told me in a private email that it wouldn't work alongside  
progressive rendering in CSS. From what I understand, it only applies  
to paged media however.

The problem is that you can't lay out a page until all the footnotes  
for that page have been found; if footnotes are all at the end of the  
document -- as in my backward compatible proposal -- then no page  
with a footnote can be rendered until the footnote content, at the  
end of the document, has been parsed.

So, for progressive rendering on paged media, footnote's content  
would need to occur either before the footnote mark in the text, or  
at the same place. Looks like we're in a dead end: it's either  
progressive rendering or a backward compatible markup.

  - - -

To draw a parallel, Ian suggested some days ago making <tfoot> legal  
when at the end of <table>. This has similar implications: it breaks  
progressive rendering on paged media when the table spans on more  
than one page (assuming the footer is shown at the bottom of each  
page, that is).

So I'm going to ask: where do we stand on progressive rendering for  
paged media? and what is the current state of HTML in this regard?


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/