1 Untitled

Oh, my! Don’t use multicolumn layout on screen! Pleeeease! I like how it looks in print preview in Opera 8.5

posted at 02:29 am on September 27, 2005 by Andrey Petrov

2 Of interest

Peter-Paul Koch has done a test suite for the new column CSS commands:

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2005/09/multicolumn_lay_1.html

Can the tests in the A List Apart examples be made to resize dynamically? It would be great if they did (when the browser window size is changed by any amount). Otherwise we might as well stick break tags in each column to get the same effect. :-)

posted at 03:27 am on September 27, 2005 by Chris Hester

3 Clarification

Sorry, I meant divide the columns by hand using separate divs, not break tags. Too busy with InDesign which has column flow built-in.

posted at 03:32 am on September 27, 2005 by Chris Hester

4 Sweet

Let the up and down scrolling commence!

posted at 04:41 am on September 27, 2005 by Egor Kloos

5 Interesting

I have to say the concept here is very sound, particularly in formatting for print styles, however I feel that some testing will need to be put in to produce sound web implementation. I must admit, after reading Egor Kloos’ comment the prospect of up and down scrolling does not sound particularly appetising…

posted at 04:52 am on September 27, 2005 by Andrew Beeken

6 Horizontal scrolling the the rescue

Columnar layout is going to work much better with pages designed to scroll left to right rather than up and down.

Up and down scrolling is just going to be tedious with columnar layout. But if pages show a series of columns no taller than the viewport, but the page scrolls left to right – this may turn out to be a very nice way of making sites that are easier to read and closer to physical media.

Will require some development on the browser, HID front to make it workable though.

posted at 05:05 am on September 27, 2005 by Duncan Drury

7 CSS: The best is yet to come

If this does not quicken your appetite for future css features nothing will…

posted at 06:16 am on September 27, 2005 by Tim Fischbach

8 Surely the psychology ...

... dictates that one should not specify the number of columns, but instead the number of words per line. Given that the motivation is to maximise readability by setting the number of words per line to a reasoable number and the fact that the viewport size is variable, it seesm to me that the best solution would involve specifying the number of words per line and make the layout engine determine how many columns are needed. Further, perhaps there should be a preference to say whether horizontal scrolling should be used instead of up-and-down scrolling (i.e. the engine lays out the text so that the preferred method of scrolling is required if necessary).

posted at 06:28 am on September 27, 2005 by C R

9 Very useful

Thanks for posting up this article, I can see this being useful not in implementing print styles as such but just doing the normal web tasks like having a list of related links to the right hand side. Yes that could be done with floats, but I’m thinking more along the lines of getting table based developers to cross over, where the mindset isn’t float left float right clear both, and that can only be a good thing.

posted at 06:29 am on September 27, 2005 by Lee Jordan

10 Scrolling & printing

I see CSS3 columns as mainly useful within print stylesheets. On paper, there’s a benefit to fitting as many readable lines on as few sheets as possible. On screen, it doesn’t matter so much, as the scrollable browser is unlimited.

As noted above, the text-at-viewport-height sideways scrolling approach where it wraps into as many columns as needed is the only real layout I can see succeeding onscreen. Mozilla’s implementation does support this, where you set the “height” of an element and the “column-count” is adjusted automatically, but sadly it’s not part of the W3 specs (IIRC, from PPK’s tests).

posted at 06:35 am on September 27, 2005 by Angus Turnbull