[css-flexbox] Flex Container Baselines

In <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Jun/0085.html>
timeless mentioned that, in the cases where there are no explicitly
baseline-aligned items, it would make more sense to use the main-axis
baseline of the first item that has a baseline, rather than using the
baseline of the first item if it has one and then falling back to the
bottom of its content box.

I'm not sure this is necessary, since I'd imagine that in most cases
if you wanted to align to the baseline of the flex container's contents,
you'd also have requested baseline alignment of said contents.

In any case, thoughts?

Option A (current text):
   1. Use shared baseline of baseline-aligned items
   2. Use baseline of first item
   3. Synthesize baseline from content box of first item
      (if first item doesn't have a baseline)

Option B (proposed):
   1. Use shared baseline of baseline-aligned items
   2. Use baseline of first item that has a base line
   3. Synthesize baseline from content box of first item
      (if no items in that row/column have a real baseline).

I lean towards A because it means we don't have to treat synthesized
and real baselines differently as we walk up the tree.

But I can also see that it would be confusing to baseline-align to
the bottom of a first item that's an image when the second item has
text.

Note that given A, the author can still achieve this result by
requesting baseline alignment for the second item. But they'd have
to do that explicitly -- which will give better results when there
are multiple items, but may not be as intuitive otherwise.

~fantasai

Received on Monday, 31 August 2015 22:35:27 UTC