haakon-wium-lie's comments

We obviously have different points of view: I find that the best presentations on mobile devices often borrow more from paged designs than from scrolled designs. As such, I believe that being able to paginate content on dynamic screens is important for the future of CSS and the web.

Pages and columns have been basic building blocks in typography since the Romans started cutting scrolls into pages. This is not why browsers should support them. We should do so because they help us make better, more beautiful, user experiences on mobile devices.

It's a way of using multicol to save screenspace. For Wikipedia references, this works well even in scrolled environments. It would not work so well for body text du to columns then being longer than the height of the screen. For longer articles, pagination is required.

I agree that paged layout are both cool and terrifying. Scrolled layout are much simpler for the formatter as there always is more space to use. Splitting content into pages, known as pagination, can be hard when there are unbreakable chunks in the content. In most cases you can split tables nicely (if they are real tables and not typographical devices), but images should never be split.

Still, I think it's worth it. A nicely laid out page is a pleasure to read, and I've never heard of only who have scrolled through "War and Peace" -- the act of turning a page seems more graceful. And when you are reading for child on your lap, turning the page to see if there's an interesting drawing of a rabbit becomes an event.

Surely, scrollbars will not go away, but we should be able to support pages one the web, too. Web pages, for real.

No media queries are used, the HTML/CSS source of the document is linked to further down in the article.

Yes, that's how the spec is written: the style sheet specifies an optimal line length, but it will be adjusted somewhat to fill the whitespace.

Check out Wikipedia, they use multi-column layout nicely for their references.

Don't be sad, doing paged layouts is quite an interesting challenge in CSS. Native apps use the routinely and newspapers is just one well-known example. See the spec for more examples. Also, the challenge here is not to replicate newspapers, but to make the content responsive on screens of all sizes.