21 Two ships passing in the night...

Judgments on usefulness aside, I find it humorous that so many Web publishers are longing for a way to easily display content flowing across multiple columns, while at the same time that newspaper publishers are dreaming of pushing content on electronic paper in single, scrolling columns.

posted at 06:29 pm on September 28, 2005 by Jason Greene

22 Untitled

Should there be a column height limit as well, to prevent any up and down scrolling?

posted at 10:08 pm on September 28, 2005 by eric demay

23

Good work, Cédric. Thanks for bringing attention to the CSS3 multi-column implementations in today’s browsers!

I would have enjoyed reading a summary of your script’s columnizing logic. From looking at the DOM of a test case it’s apparent that you’re dividing the text block into a series of divs, one per column. When a paragraph is split across columns, you’re inserting an empty span at the bottom of the first column to force that last line to justify. I’ll read your script to see what other rules you’re implementing.

One point in your line-breaking logic to repair: in your Test Case 2 the last line of column 1 is broken before the comma:

Construction of the RMS <i>Titanic</*i*>
, funded by the American…

— perhaps the comma isn’t considered part of the preceding word because of the intervening HTML close-tag.

Seeing how unsightly justified text looks in narrow columns brings to mind the various tools & rules that typographers use to eliminate rivers of whitespace when setting justified text, such as breaking hyphenated words across lines and implementing discretionary hyphens, things you might consider including in the scope of your columnizing script if it’s to be useful professionally. I look forward to seeing future renditions!

posted at 08:22 am on September 29, 2005 by Paul Novitski

24 Could be very good

Columns can be very usefull. Many pages of quality would be better with text in columns.
But it will be a problem, if a column is higher than the viewport.

Anyway, the article is rather good.

posted at 10:24 am on September 29, 2005 by Kristian Kjærgaard

25 css3-multi-column.js: offline development

Line 83 (function loadCssCache) of the file above:

if(typeof xmlhttp.status 'undefined' ||    xmlhttp.status 200 ||
   xmlhttp.status == 304
)

makes it impossible to use it offline via the file: protocol with gecko based browsers (tested with Firefox 1.0.7) as the returned xmlhttp.status is 0;

Fix:
if(typeof xmlhttp.status 'undefined' ||    !xmlhttp.status ||    xmlhttp.status 200 ||
   xmlhttp.status == 304
)

posted at 01:30 pm on September 29, 2005 by Marek Möhling

26 messed up code above

I used [nbsp][nbsp][nbsp][line break] to format code, as or <code> is not allowed: it renders well in the preview, obviously it doesn’t on submit… don’t know what to do – I uploaded my msg here

posted at 02:00 pm on September 29, 2005 by Marek Möhling

27 messed up code above, revisited

Note to the editors: the post above rendered differently too in preview. You may want to make my first post readable and delete the rest.

posted at 02:07 pm on September 29, 2005 by Marek Möhling

28 Untitled

The technique here is good and I thought the article was quite interesting. It’s experimental, but I can see it being very useful for print CSS specifically.

I would only suggest we think very hard before using it on screen.

posted at 02:27 pm on September 29, 2005 by Nick Olejniczak

29 columns - appealing for the designer

I always thought columnar layout was appealing purely because it was difficult to achieve in a ‘proper’ way. Making it simple removes the appeal of using entirely for me. I certainly dislike it from a user’s perspective.

posted at 06:58 am on September 30, 2005 by Jon Dowland

30 Gah... and Thanks!

After fidling for a couple of weeks with the idea of a columnar layout with a CMS like Textpattern, you come around and make something that works wonderfully. My only question is… Why couldn’t you do it earlier!

Seriously though, thanks. I thought my head was going to explode.

posted at 04:59 am on October 3, 2005 by Brandon Erik Bertelsen