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By anawillem on
i know the title of this post leaves a lot to be desired, but in considering a theme refactor in my future, it seems like it would make good sense to start paying attention to it {display: table;} is going to change a lot of things...
why? well, Internet Explorer is once again paying attention to standards compliance (they are Acid2 compliant). it changes the game - because whereas before people were positioning things awkwardly on the page using css floats and clears and absolute positions. assigning the {display: table;} or {display: table-column;} (etc) property to any class or id (as designated by CSS2.1)
so although we are still dealing with the catastrophe of IE6, we should no longer avoid using CSS2.1 to the fullest because Microsoft and IE are back in the game in a saner way. this is not a plug for IE, but just a question of whether it is time to change our strategy as themers?
being able to assign table-like properties to displays is huge. saves time and complexity and pain.
i only know this because 'borders books' near my house is going out of business, and there was a book sitting on an otherwise sadly empty shelf called 'everything you know about css is wrong' by rachel andrew and kevin yank and published by sitepoint, and i took is a personal challenge.
one of the most awkward aspects of the themes i work with (any table-lessly designed theme but i do a lot of work with zen subthemes) is the awkward conventions we use to position divisions on a page: a combination of clears and floats that is sometimes dizzying. using the display:table family of properties (instead of a combination of floats and clears) would change everything.
and i mean everything. ;)
wanting to exercise due diligence, i am looking around, and although the coast SEEMS clear, it's not entirely clear that this is the case - there just isn't a lot of documentation about it on drupal or from what i can tell with any of the major theme developers.
i would like to initiate opening this discussion up to the CSS experts out there, and see if we can't make sense of these new developments and if anyone has any objections to beginning to incorporate it...?
