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Bug 12858 - This doesn't actually define "align descendants". It says which descendants are to be aligned, but not what's supposed to happen to them. Is it like floating, or something else?
Summary: This doesn't actually define "align descendants". It says which descendants ...
Status: CLOSED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-06-02 18:27 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-09-23 17:59 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-06-02 18:27:32 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/rendering.html
Section: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#alignment

Comment:
This doesn't actually define "align descendants".  It says which descendants
are to be aligned, but not what's supposed to happen to them.  Is it like
floating, or something else?

Posted from: 68.175.61.233
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686) AppleWebKit/535.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/13.0.782.1 Safari/535.1
Comment 1 Tab Atkins Jr. 2011-06-03 05:02:41 UTC 
<center> is handled magically by all UAs.  There is no way to really define it more explicitly.
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor 2011-06-03 16:40:36 UTC 
What do you mean, "no way"?  Not fully in terms of CSS, but there's got to be definable and standardizable behavior.  It would be useful for me to know what browsers actually do here, so that I can make an informed decision on how to spec the justify* editing commands.  (Currently I just use text-align, but align= behaves more usefully in some cases, and I might want to add some extra align=-like features as special cases.  Gecko seems to do this, like adding auto margins to tables.)
Comment 3 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:15:19 UTC 
mass-move component to LC1
Comment 4 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-08-15 21:59:23 UTC 
I assume you are asking for more detail in this sentence:

"When a user agent is to align descendants of a node, the user agent is expected to align only those descendants that have both their 'margin-left' and 'margin-right' properties computing to a value other than 'auto', that are over-constrained and that have one of those two margins with a used value forced to a greater value, and that do not themselves have an applicable align attribute. When multiple elements are to align a particular descendant, the most deeply nested such element is expected to override the others."

What kind of detail are you looking for?

Would this be accurate and sufficient?:

"... Aligned elements are expected to be aligned by having the used values of their left and right margins be set accordingly."
Comment 5 Aryeh Gregor 2011-08-16 14:45:45 UTC 
I *think* that's what I'm looking for, yes.  The current spec doesn't say what you do to those descendants: whether you float them, or set their margins, or what.  Brief testing in WebKit suggests you do just set the appropriate margin(s) to auto, not actually float them.

So I don't know whether your suggested addition is accurate, but it does seem to say what to do, which is a start.  It also doesn't blatantly contradict the trivial test case I constructed, so it might be accurate too.  :)
Comment 6 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-09-01 00:04:24 UTC 
Ok, I'll use that wording.
Comment 7 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-09-22 23:38:15 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: Concurred with comment 5.
Comment 8 contributor 2011-09-22 23:40:18 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r6566.
Check-in comment: add detail
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6565&to=6566