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My guess would be that HTML and CSS originally were meant to deal with sites that resemble a paper document (i.e. a collection of A4 papers) so it tries to be c
by spacebuffer 3y ago
My guess would be that HTML and CSS originally were meant to deal with sites that resemble a paper document (i.e. a collection of A4 papers) so it tries to be consistent with that:
- the maximum width of a paper document is simply the width of a piece of A4 => so an element can have a well defined width, that being a percentage of the width of the document
- the maximum height of a paper document though.. doesn't exist as you can always add more papers, similarly css can't define the height as a certain percent of the document, so it chose to look at it's own child elements.
- magpi3 3y agoYes, I have the same intuition. Sites scroll downward, the height of a website is never really fixed, but there does seem to be some assumption that the width of a website is fixed. At least when I approach it with this mental model in mind, it is logical.
- chrisjj 3y ago> - the maximum width of a paper document is simply the width of a piece of A4 Unsafe. Many A4 docs from spreadsheet to kids illustrated book are wider than A4.