A commonplace complaint regarding existing web standards is they never provide designers with enough control. CSS has evolved to the point where quite complex layouts and typography are now possible, but designers always want more—and this is where Adobe aims to plug the gap with its CSS Regions prototype.
Greg Rewis, Principal Evangelist, Web Tools, Adobe Systems, told us that CSS Regions is "a proposal from Adobe, submitted to the W3C as an addition to the CSS module, which would allow web designers to create more complex designs, like those seen in magazines". He said that the proposal includes the ability for text to flow between individual boxes, for designers to attach styling to the boxes into which the text flows—such as a paragraph that breaks over two boxes with different styling—as well as enabling text to flow into arbitrary shapes or around irregular shapes.
