On Thu, 12 Dec 2002 tblanchard at mac.com wrote:

> Yeah - but the tricky bit is in matching the html layout model - which
> has a certain kind of flow that can be "channeled" into shapes via
> things like tables and lists.  Its not at all like a canvas - more like
> a stream.  In most of the visual web design tools I've seen, they
> present the user with a canvas and then try to emulate it using lots
> and lots of nested tables.  This tends to produce pages that render
> really slowly.
>
> Maybe someone can enlighten me on an appropriate container that will
> layout out things like an html page?

Julian and I did some experimental work a while back on a layout engine
for Seaside that used the expandable hbox/vbox style (like Gtk, some Swing
engines, etc), and produced a single table (with excessive use of colspan)
instead of using nesting.

One thing I never got happening was a reasonable treatment of CSS - what I
wanted was to be able to assign a class to a box, but since the HTML
nesting doesn't match the box nesting, you'd have to hang the class on
each individual cell, and I think at the time I wasn't aware elements
could have multiple classes at once, so that didn't seem like a feasible
solution.

Maybe it's time to pull that code out again.