Google Planning To Remove CSS Regions From Blink

mikejuk writes "Google and Opera split from WebKit to create Blink, their own HTML rendering engine, and everyone was worried about the effect on standards. Now we have the first big example of a split in the form of CSS Regions support. Essentially Regions are used to provide the web equivalent of text flow, a concept very familiar to anyone who has used a desktop publishing program. The basic idea is that you define containers for a text stream which is then flowed from one container to another to provide a complex multicolumn layout. The W3C standard for Regions has mostly been created by Adobe — a long time DTP company. Now the Blink team has proposed removing Regions support to save 10,000 lines of code in 350,000 in the name of efficiency. If Google does remove the Regions code, which looks highly likely, this would leave Safari and IE 10/11 as the only two major browsers to support Regions. Both Apple and Microsoft have an interest in ensuring that their hardware can be used to create high quality magazine style layouts — Google and Opera aren't so concerned. I thought standards were there to implement not argue with." Although mikejuk thinks this is a bad thing, a lot of people think CSS Regions are awful. Mozilla has never intended to implement them, instead offering the CSS Fragmentation proposal as an alternative. One major flaw of CSS Regions is its reliance upon markup that is used solely for layout, violating the separation of content and style that CSS is intended to enforce.

Comments

The web needs a good layout engine

[mozumder]

With the web finally hitting magazine-quality typography, there's definitely a need for a proper layout engine that's flexible and can achieve exactly what graphic designers want.

CSS regions might not be it (or it might), but Google needs to offer something to replace it, because that's the closest thing the web had to offer magazine-quality layout. The web needs the equivalent to inDesign.

If they do not, everyone will just layout for iPad (Safari), and that will be considered standard, while other other layout engines like Chrome remain unsupported.

Apple is very good at pushing typography, and had Google offered something that can replace CSS Regions, Apple would have considered it.

Re:The web needs a good layout engine

[mozumder]

Postscript is for fixed devices.

The issue that programmatic auto-flow systems like CSS regions try to solve is that the layout/text-flow changes with viewport dimension changes.

Honestly at this point, HTML should be obsoleted and everyone use an XML standard like RSS, or something semantic, and lay that out directly with CSS, since the entire web is converging on an blog-post/article-like data model.

Wordpress itself should be the equivalent data-model standard. Most CMSs revolve around that core data structure anyways. No need to build HTML from Wordpress, then lay that out with CSS. Might as well lay out the Wordpress-like data structure directly, without an intermediate HTML step.

Re:The web needs a good layout engine

[Tablizer]

This gets into the sticky conflict of art versus utility. Most geeks consider the utility standpoint first: we want to absorb info as quickly as possible. However to some designers and/or readers, a web page is as much art as utility: the designer is trying to inject a feeling using look, style, and feel.

Are you going to tell an oil painter to "increase the contrast" so you can see his/her painting better? "Hey Monet, your dither size is too large, I can't make out the detail!"

I'm not condoning any one viewpoint, only pointing out there may be conflicting goals and expectations involved here.

Re:Ugh

[Jason Levine]

Any designer who tried to argue with me that their page *needed* to be 1920 pixels wide would get a long-winded diatribe about mobile devices and responsive design. It's fine if your page stops growing at 1920 pixels, but you can't expect a tablet or mobile user to fit in 1920 pixels. If your solution is "let them pinch and zoom" then you're going to lose mobile users who are a fast growing segment. Instead, your site should use CSS Media Queries to reconfigure the page depending on the size of the user's display. If done properly, you can resize the browser from desktop size to mobile size and see the transition take place. (Try it with The Boston Globe's website.)