[whatwg] Suggestion for new element/attribute

[Brenton Strine]

Consider this case:

You have a table one row high with two cells. It's width
is 100%.

You want the width of the left cell to be only as big as
the content, and you want the right cell to take up all
the rest of the space.

However, the amount of content in both the right and the
left cell changes, so you can't give a percent or a pixel
width. 

In that situation, you could either 1) intentionally give
the right cell an incorrect width of 100%, or 2) put a
whole lot of invisible text in it, so that the cell
always expands enough to make the left cell only the
minimum size needed.

-----Original Message-----
From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
[mailto:bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 25, 2007 3:44 PM
To: Brenton Strine
Cc: whatwg at lists.whatwg.org
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Suggestion for new
element/attribute

This sounds very much like something that should be done
in CSS, not HTML. But can you explain what you mean by
"expand ... as if it were full of text"? If something is
already a given size, then filling it with text should
not make it expand.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Brenton Strine wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am new here, so please let me know if I am doing
> anything out of order.
> 
> I would like to make a suggestion for soemthing I want
to
> see in HTML5.
> 
> I call it the inflate tag. <inflate>.
> 
> The purpose of this tag is to expand that which
contains
> it as if it were full of text. I have seen many
websites
> where the designers were forced to put long strings of
> hidden text into a cell in order to make it expand
> correctly. Thus text browsers find strange segments
like
> this:
> 
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w
w
> w w w w w w w w 
> 
> Of course, developers already have the ability to
specify
> the width in terms of pixels, ems, percent, and tons of
> other stuff. But there are times, particularly in fluid
> design, when you can't get the div to work the way you
> want without text to expand it.
> 
> This could even be an attribute rather than a tag:
> width="inflate".
> 
> Brenton
>