W3C CSS3 Multicolumns, "CSS3saver"

[Tadej Štajner]

Hi, all,

It seems that the CSS3 multicol standard is getting support in the majority of the browsers. It seems to allow for quite some expressiveness in layouts that doesn't seem to be doable through Treesaver (for instance, spanning a figure over columns, splitting them vertically through the center).  I think that at a glance, it's able to cover every layout that's expressible in TS grids.

The browser support also seems to be coming along nicely, although I haven't tested for consistency.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/
http://caniuse.com/multicolumn
http://galjot.si/multiple-columns

I'm considering doing an exercise in replacing the column breaking and pagination parts of treesaver with CSS3 cols. It could probably result in shrinking the codebase by quite a lot, especially avoiding the long, scary passages with goto statements that do the actual breaking. I personally think the grid selection and ranking is the really valuable part.

I already have an idea on how to tackle the grid representation so the same grid can be rendered in TS as wll as CSS3-multicol. The one puzzle I still have is how to reconcile CSS3 columns with pagination, I think something along the lines of treating the entire document as a single wide 'page' of many columns, while the view shifts left-right across the 'page', showing only a couple cols at a time.

.. any comments before i proceed shooting myself in the foot?

-- Tadej