[pmwiki-users] A question about skins

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Aug 8 10:28:36 CDT 2006


On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 09:31:43PM +1000, Kathryn Andersen wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 08:57:02AM +0100, cl at isbd.net wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 02:29:06AM +0200, Clemens Gruber wrote:
> > Maybe some way of setting a text column width inside the 'usable area'
> > of the Wiki would be good, i.e. one would set the maximum line length
> > to around 70 characters and the page generation would auto wrap at
> > that line length at display time.
> 
> Well, one can actually use character-width as a width definition in CSS
> (so you could say "width: 70em") but for some unfathomable reason, most
> of the fixed-width web-pages I've seen all seem to define their widths
> in pixels, which is the least flexible of all...

The unfathomable reason is simply that it's nearly impossible to
get things to align properly using ems instead of pixels.

As a specific example, the pmwiki skin wants to have its footer items
align with the text in the main text area.  This is almost impossible
to do using an 'ems' specification.  (There are many other examples,
but this is the largest.)

If CSS offered the possibility of saying something like "11em+10px",
then this wouldn't be a problem.

Pm




More information about the pmwiki-users mailing list