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Comment by Robin_Message | Hacker News Reader

So, with that graph floating in the middle of the columns, I'd expect to read the 4 chunks of text top-left, bottom-left, top-right, bottom-right. Did anyone else find it surprising that it actually reads top-left, top-right, bottom-left, bottom-right?

Also, if I offered you a javascript library that could lay out columns properly, on existing browsers, with two-column width floats, would you use it?

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> Also, if I offered you a javascript library that could lay out columns properly, on existing browsers, with two-column width floats, would you use it?

This is relevant to my interests. I've been working on exactly that: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/meet-treesaver-a-new-...

The left side is cut off and the right side overflows if the window isn't large enough to contain the full layout. Reducing the text size has no effect on the layout width, either. Columnized formats are annoying enough when they work but this one alienated me enough that I didn't even bother reading it.

I've been wanting to see proper support of combinations of column-height, column-width and column-span for a long time. I would definitely be a user of a library if it could give me these features.

Looking at http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/#spanning-columns it seems to me column-span is implemented exactly like the site in question, i.e. wrong from the point of view of existing behaviour (that behaviour being all the printed magazines and newspapers since we worked out how to mix text and images.)

Oh man, maybe that's why I didn't understand a damn thing about the article.

And yes, I totally would.

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