Adobe has never engaged with the web community in a forward thinking way before, but they have contributed an idea to the W3C for the official CSS3 specification that everyone would use to validate their code.
The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) was set up in October 1994 to ensure that regardless of the business or organisation tools, such as browsers, the web would function and work to the best standards. They supply guidelines for best standards in design and development, as well as recommendations for accessibility. You can find out more about the W3C by visiting www.w3c.org
Adobe’s suggestion is a notion for “CSS regions”, which defines irregular polygonal shapes and flowed text to allow for more fluid layouts on webpages:
The proposed additions from Adobe to the W3C CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) modules to build complex, magazine-like layouts using web standards. Capturing in digital form the complex layouts of a typical magazine, newspaper, or textbook requires capabilities beyond those possible with the existing CSS modules. CSS Regions is a proposal that describes how content creators can use some additional basic building blocks to express complex layouts with CSS.
Key highlights of CSS Regions include:
- Story threading — allows content to flow in multiple disjointed boxes expressed in CSS and HTML, making it possible to express more complex, magazine-style threaded layouts, including pull quotes and sidebars.
- Region styling — allows content to be styled based on the region it flows into. For example, the first few lines that fit into the first region of an article may be displayed with a different color or font, or headers flowing in a particular region may have a different background color or size. Region styling is not currently implemented in the CSS Regions prototype.
- Arbitrary content shapes and exclusions — allows content to fit into arbitrary shapes (not just rectangular boxes) or to flow around complex shapes.#
Quote taken from Adobe Labs
Whether this is approved or added to the list of standards and validation remains to be seen, but it is nice to see a major company showing acknowledgement to the web and its users.