Multi-column layouts

The new Firefox 1.5 (= Mozilla 1.8, as far as I understand) is the first one to support multi-column layouts. Of course I created a quick test page to study the effect.

Written on 13 September 2005
Categorized in Content
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Comments

1 Posted by Vasilis on 13 September 2005 | Permalink

It works on the latest nightly build of Camino too. Thanks for the test page.

2 Posted by minghong on 14 September 2005 | Permalink

Firefox 1.5 is not out yet. :-)

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 = Mozilla 1.8b4
Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 = Mozilla 1.8b5
Firefox 1.5 = Mozilla 1.8

3 Posted by Jeremy French on 14 September 2005 | Permalink

The only thing that you didn't test was the float: in-column and mid-column.
Just checked and it dosn't support these. Dosn't recognise them as valid values for float.

4 Posted by peter tipton on 15 September 2005 | Permalink

I am using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050914 Firefox/1.0.7 ie the latest version, but I don't see any of the test cases that you've developed, just paragraphs of text across the page. I have got to 'switch' anything on?.

5 Posted by Robin on 15 September 2005 | Permalink

The 1.0.x series was branched a while back and has only been receiving security enhancements. Rendering engine work has been done on the trunk and will appear in the Firefox 1.5 branch.

6 Posted by Angus Turnbull on 15 September 2005 | Permalink

It's an interesting feature and congrats to RoC and the other Mozilla "layout" developers for hacking the code to support it! However, I don't feel columns are that usable on the web in their "standard" form; the scrolling up and down involved is too annoying.

Mozilla's "height" implementation is the only implementation I'd really consider deploying, much like stories on the IHT website:

http://www.iht.com/

Pity it's not considered part of the "standards", as defining a height (especially relative to the viewport, or max-height) and therefore making a page entirely horizontally-scrolled could allow myriad interesting designs...

What do you guys think? Any design/usability gurus in the audience?

7 Posted by Scott Johnson on 25 September 2005 | Permalink

That page really craps out in Firefox 1.0.6/Mac. While I welcome new CSS features as much as the next web developer, this stuff really will need to be backward-compatible if it's ever going to take off.

8 Posted by Mats Lindblad on 3 October 2005 | Permalink

I found another thing related to columns on one of Mozillas test pages and it is "::-moz-column-content" which allowes you to style content in columns and only that content. I have tried it at http://people.su.se/~matlin/css3.html