On Dec 16, 2010, at 7:39 PM, Chetan Crasta wrote: >> It not that the spec disallowed it > > The spec did explicitly disallow it, see point number 2: > http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/CR-CSS2-20090423/visuren.html#dis-pos-flo
Better to quote the latest text: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#dis-pos-flo (not that it makes much difference for this particular point). > >> Absolutely positioned boxes are taken out of the normal flow > > The phrase "taken out of the flow" is used a bit loosely in the spec. Not really; I don't think the spec ever says that floated boxes are 'taken out of the flow', where as it is explicit about it when referring to absolute positioned boxes. Compare the 1st 2 paragraphs of CSS2.1:9.5 with the definition of absolute positioning in 9.6. http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#floats http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#absolute-positioning Granted the text in 9.5 also says 'not in the flow'... > Both absolutely positioned and floated elements are out of the flow, > the difference being that floated elements are still "visible" to > inline boxes. Floated boxes are shifted left or right with respect to the line of content but still participate in the general flow of said content, whereas absolute positioned elements are completely removed from the flow, and are sort of layered above it (or below it !). > I'm not sure why the spec disallowed combining absolute positioning > with floating, because it seems to be the only way an element could be > stretched to the width or height of its auto-height containing element > while being aligned to the left or right. Because absolute positioning is ultimately orthogonal to float, by its nature it is not affected by the surrounding contents, as stated in 9.6. On Dec 16, 2010, at 11:04 PM, Alan Gresley wrote: > WebKit renders this test different to other browser. > > <http://css-class.com/test/css/visformatting/first-letter-floated-abc2.htm> > > This is due to where WebKit places the float holder and something to do with > differences between line boxes and line-height in WebKit and other brwosers. > Philippe explains better. Uh, Opera reders the same as Webkit (and last I checked, IE does the same). What I'm missing in your test ? Gecko renders it differently. But read carefully about floated first-letter - second paragraph: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#first-letter This is what Gecko does: [quote] To allow UAs to render a typographically correct drop cap or initial cap, the UA may choose a line-height, width and height based on the shape of the letter, unlike for normal elements. [/quote] Philippe --- Philippe Wittenbergh http://l-c-n.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [cs...@lists.css-discuss.org] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ List policies -- http://css-discuss.org/policies.html Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
