Re: [xsl] Displaying Icon in Page Margin

["Tony Graham" <tgraham@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, September 15, 2011 8:42 pm, Eliot Kimber wrote:
...
> It seems little like a bug in the FO spec that side floats apply to the

The best way to avoid finding yourself saying the same thing about XSL FO
2.0 when it comes out is to enter a issue in the W3C Bugzilla so the WG
has to consider it before the spec can become a Recommendation.  See
http://www.w3.org/XML/2008/01/xsl-fo-bugzilla.html

> nearest containing reference area and not to the containing flow's
> reference
> area (e.g., xsl-region-body). I can't think of a case where I'd want the
> side float anchored in a table to be relative to the table cell's
> reference
> area and not to the overall flow's reference area.

Possibly because that's not what you're trying to do this week.  If you
had only a couple of absolutely-positioned block containers on the page,
you'd probably want the floats to stay within the block containers rather
than floating willy-nilly.

There is an existing requirement [1] to add "the ability to specify
whether inheritance is in effect at reference area boundaries".  The
example in the requirements document is indent of a table being propagated
to its table cells.  There's also several requirements to do with floats
[2] that you might argue should also include this case.  You may also get
some mileage out of the precedent that change bars are always positioned
relative to the column.

The reasons why the XSL FO spec is the way it is are probably to do with
trying to be internally consistent about hanging things off reference
areas and with consistency with CSS2 (which was a requirement of XSL 1.0),
where the "float" property positions things relative to their "containing
block" [3].  See, e.g., the examples in the CSS2 spec [5].

Regards,


Tony Graham                                   tgraham@xxxxxxxxxx
Consultant                                 http://www.mentea.net
Mentea       13 Kelly's Bay Beach, Skerries, Co. Dublin, Ireland
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[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20-req/#N66757
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/xslfo20-req/#N66033
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#containing-block
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#propdef-float
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#comparison