Spec: relative column widths

[Michael Brauer <michael.brauer@sun.com>]

Hi all,

our spec currently contains two use cases for relative column widths.

The first one are (text) column definitions that can be applied to page 
styles, text sections or text boxes. Relative column widths here are 
specified by a style:rel-width attribute that is attached to a 
<style:column> element (section 14.7.4). The attribute's value is a non 
negative integer value.

The second use case are table columns. To specify a relative table 
column width, the table:rel-column-width attribute is used (section 
14.9.1). The attribute's value is a relative length, that is a positive 
integer value followed by a '*' character. This has been taken over from 
the relative table column width specification of HTML 4 (section 
11.2.4). Surprisingly,  this '*'-notation seems not to exist in either 
CSS2.1 or CSS3 (at least, I didn't find it).

The semantics of both attributes are very similar: If a column's 
relative width (without the '*' for table columns) is 's', and if 'S' is 
the sum of all these values, and if 'A' is the available absolute width 
for all columns, then a specific absolute column width is s*(A/S).

Since both attributes are so similar, it seems to be reasonable if they 
take the same value type. Since the '*' notation for table columns has 
been choosen to simplify conversions to HTML4, I would like to propose 
to use this notation also for the relative text column widths.

Best regards

Michael