Text-columns and CSS

[Erik Wikström]

On 2006-10-25 12:17, Tom Davis wrote:
Greetings,

On 2006 Oct 25, at 4:19 am, Erik Wikström wrote:
Saw a page just the other day where the amount of columns adapted  
to the resolution and textsize dynamically, so when I increased the  
fontsize the number of columns decreased.
Do you happen to know the url of that site? As useful as it obviously  
would be, there is no CSS2.1 attribute that will reflow a block of  
text into multiple columns. It is certainly possible to intercept  
window resize events and use javascript to move words of text between  
DIVs to balance them and add new columns as necessary, but there is  
no way I know of to intercept user changes of text size (Firefox &  
Safari) or Zoom level (Opera) so I'd be very interested in seeing how  
someone else did it. That could be a real boon.

Of course, the site is probably flash, which is proprietary and not  
well supported on the BSDs.
No, the site was not in flash, though I have not been able to find it. I 
have, however, been able to reproduce the behavior of that site (though 
I don't know if they used the same method.

Take a look at: http://www.chalmers.it/~eriwik/test.html (should work in 
Firefox v1.5 and later)

The number of columns change as the size of the window change, or the 
fontsize change. It's using non-standard CSS (from a W3C draft *) and 
the properties have been prepended with "-moz-".

* www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol

--
Erik Wikström