Minimum and maximum padding and margin wanted

In What I Want From CSS3 - Part 1, Andy Budd notes that min-padding, max-padding, min-margin and max-margin would be very useful, especially for liquid layouts.

Yes indeed, that would be very useful. I suppose the properties Andy mentions would be the shorthand versions, so to specify the minimum amount of padding for an element you would write something like this:

  1. min-padding: 0em 1em 1em 2em;

And the corresponding longhand would be this:

  1. min-padding-top: 0em;
  2. min-padding-right: 1em;
  3. min-padding-bottom: 1em;
  4. min-padding-left: 2em;

Posted on October 27, 2005 in CSS, Quicklinks

Comments

  1. October 27, 2005 by Ara Pehlivanian

    Forget min-padding. It would be nice for an implementation of min-height/max-height (in IE that is).

    As for min-padding, yeah that’d be nice. :-)

  2. October 27, 2005 by Steve Williams

    Can’t say I’m missing min/max padding?

    gradient and drop-shadow selectors would get my vote, and help to trim a few unnecessary images from my sites!

    Oh, and corner… Especially if it handled the border too!

    corner:radius 1em; /*bliss*/

  3. October 28, 2005 by Anonymous

    Background-image resizing.
    Borders defined by set of 8 images.

  4. October 28, 2005 by Chris Heilmann

    Could be a good idea, however wouldn’t a proper min/max on an element with a percentual padding do the same?

  5. October 28, 2005 by Lachlan Hunt

    Actually, there are better ideas than introducing new properties for everything you’d want min/max variants for.

    min(), max() and calc() functional notations have been suggested previously, with the idea being that you could specify something like:

    margin: min(10%, 2em); padding: max(5%, 20px); width: calc(80% - 2em);

  6. October 28, 2005 by Roger Johansson (Author comment)

    Chris: Almost, but not quite. Read Andy’s post - he explains the problem with percentages.

    Lachlan: That seems like a good idea.

  7. November 11, 2005 by YaaL

    One thing I miss sometimes is defining whether the scrollbar should be inside or outside (so when I tell a box to be 500 pixels wide, it is 500 pixels wide, not 500±scrollbar, depending on browser’s mood).

  8. December 1, 2005 by oliver taylor

    Yeah, this would be nice. I’ve often run into situations when min-margins would be useful.

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