Okay, so here’s the official announcement of floating divs.
It seems I’d been conceptualizing them wrong!
The key is that floating divs were replacing an earlier system, involving moving to specific X and Y coordinates in the status bar, and then drawing there. Floating divs aren’t meant to be nesting inside each other like Matryoshka dolls. Instead, floating divs are the new way of specifying those X and Y coordinates! The float parameters determine the X, and the margin-top determines the Y. That’s why drawing multiple floating divs in a row makes them overlap. I’m effectively specifying the same Y coordinate every time.
Now I understand somewhat better why this was done. But I still find it deeply unintuitive. So here’s my new proposal: divs defined with position: absolute will use the old system, always positioned relative to the top left corner of the status bar, while divs defined with position: relative will instead use the current cursor Y position, after drawing the surrounding divs.
So something like this:
(style class @status) height: 2em;
(style class @line) width: 100\%;
(status bar @status) {
(div @line) { Line One }
(div @line) { (space 10) Line Two }
}
Will produce the following if @line has position: absolute (the old behavior):
Line One Line Two
And the following if @line has position: relative:
Line One
Line Two
What do you all think of this? Does it seem like a reasonable compromise? And most importantly: can someone who actually knows CSS wizardry tell me if this is how it would work in an actual web browser (like the Å-machine interpreter)?