Columns on the screen (like at roc's blog) are annoying since you have to keep scrolling up and down to read the content. I suppose if used sparingly and intelligently, they could be OK on the screen. Where this feature really should shine is in print stylesheets, since the print medium is where columns are most natural.

I agree with Greg. Since most layout involves one or two sidebar which already took a large portion of the horizontal space, there is no point to have columns in the main article.

That's great feature which might draw HTML closer to publishing formats. I also agree with Greg that misusing might be anoying to read on screen unless intended for printout. Asa when you run next "Ask Asa", please try to answer my question: How is MoFo involved in W3C and is there any MoFo member working on CSS3 standard? Daniel Glazman recently expressed a need for CSS3 redesign.

Daniel Glazman is afaik a member of the CSS WG so he is involved in that design... He is not a member of MoFo though. I believe David Baron is both a member of the staff and CSS WG member.

I agree with Greg as well. Columns are designed for print. On websites, it's just annoying.

I'm glad to see that Mozilla is working on CSS3, but I hope you don't follow down that dark path of "extending" standards or adding browser-specific markup. These -moz-* properties should go away once the draft is finalized.

I'm with everyone else: the scrolling is the main problem. I remember in about 1997, when tables were at their height, a lot of websites (including the likes of the BBC) used columns, which looked nice but were really annoying because of the scrolling and basically not suited to screen-based media.

So just because we can do it with CSS and tables doesn't make it okay!

Of course one good thing about columns is that they make nice short lines which are easier to read. The trouble with ever-growing resolutions means that the lines of text get longer and longer and harder to read (I certainly find this on 1280x1024, especially on websites with small text). The most commonly used solution to this (again, employed by the BBC) is to have fixed width layouts that keeps the text nice and thin.

Perhaps the most inventive solution I've seen so far is from the International Herald and Tribune, which uses columns that are automatically resized to be no longer than the browser window's height. There's an example at: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/27/sports/oxford.html.

Ah, it's been the same for years - give people a new technology to play with, and nobody can use it subtlely can they. We had an explosion of GIF animations across the web, and then follow that up with the explosion of insane and annoying DHTML, like cute bunnies chasing after your cursor. If this thing gets popular it's going to cause headache hell to users. >_