[whatwg] Joined blocks

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Sat Aug 2 00:01:23 PDT 2008


On Sat, 2 Aug 2008, Shannon wrote:
> 
> The accuracy of your statement depends largely on whether the 
> specification allows the content source to be defined across all joined 
> blocks or only in the first. For example:
> 
> <div id="col1"><p>first para</p><p>second para</p></div>
> ... other unrelated markup ...
> <div join="col1"><p>third para</p></div>
> 
> This markup would be common when the author is trying to support legacy 
> or non-CSS browsers.

I agree that such markup would be common today, but I think that we should 
design the language with the intent to move past this style.

I would much, much rather see documents that <section> elements for each 
section, and then have the CSS split the section block into multiple 
boxes, than have the markup itself have each final resulting box split 
into different <div>s.

In the meantime, having blocks split into separate <div>s is the only way 
forward, but I think we can work around the accessibility problems of this 
by including links to the next part at the end of each block. I don't 
think we should add new features to handle this in HTML, I'd rather add 
them to CSS.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'



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