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searching for this functionality, i came across the 2001 draft, which specified column-span to be defined as none | all | <integer> | inherit. i don’t get the none (spans no columns? does that mean display:none‽), but other than that, it’s nice. it even comes with this useful picture.

column-span: 2

code is sth. along the lines of:

article { column-count: 3 }
h1 { column-span: all }
h2 { column-span: 2 }

a bit history: it was abolished in 2005. 2007, it was re-introduced with the values 1 | all, wich became none | all 2011 (reintroducting the nonsensical none).

my question: why was this property so badly curtailed? is there any reasoning behind that? (and behind the none)

flying sheep
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1 Answers1

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In the current draft at least, the property name column-span effectively means “spans several columns” and the value none means “no” or “false.” In the December 2009 draft, things were more natural, so that the property could be interpreted as “number of columns spanned” and the initial value was 1 and not none.

In general, identifiers in CSS are often misleading and may reflect various stages of planning—think about white-space, which affects line breaking in general, not just text, or letter-spacing, which affects all characters, not just letters.

Based on what I have read in various discussions, the reason for limiting the values to just two (no spanning, spanning all) is that implementing other values would be essentially different and more complicated. Moreover, the demand for such a feature appears to be considerably more limited than for the basic functionality.

This sounds realistic, especially since even the very basic multi-column layout has so poor support: I don’t think any major browser supports it under the proposed standard names (but some support it under their browser-specific property names), and there does not seem to be any support even to column-span: all under any name. (Rumors say Safari supports it, but my tests on the Win 7 version don’t confirm this.)

Jukka K. Korpela
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  • thanks, good answer! could you link to one or more of the mentioned discussions? – flying sheep Jan 19 '12 at 13:25
  • @flying sheep, Minutes and Resolutions 2011-09-21 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Sep/0377.html discuss (tangentially) the effect of column-span with number value as meaning “floats.” – Jukka K. Korpela Jan 19 '12 at 13:48