[css-grid-3] Masonry - align-tracks / justify-tracks potentially not desirable for accessibility.

[bfgeek]

This feature of css-grid-3 allows developers to align tracks individually. However this creates a disconnect pretty quickly with the "visual order" and the "box order" of the document.

Example 9 in the spec demonstrates this well:
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-grid-3/#masonry-axis-alignment

The tab order for above would be 1,2,3,4... etc. However the visual order for that example definitely not that :).

The use-cases I've seen here typically align masonry axis tracks together rather than individually.

Something to lean on here might be something similar to how flexbox works in that you can start the masonry algorithm for the "end" side, instead of the "start" (e.g. row-reverse and friends).

Note this problem is different to alignment on individual grid/flex items, as for those layout modes alignment happens within a line/track, and the visual order still matches the box order.

[css-meeting-bot]

The CSS Working Group just discussed [css-grid-3] Masonry - align-tracks / justify-tracks potentially not desirable for accessibility., and agreed to the following:

• RESOLVED: Drop align-tracks, justify-tracks from Masonry spec

The full IRC log of that discussion

<fantasai> iank_: Mats's spec for Masonry had a feature align-tracks/justify-tracks which allowed you to align individual tracks
<fantasai> iank_: personally I haven't seen developers ask for this
<fantasai> iank_: and it leads to some accessibility problems
<fantasai> iank_: if you look at the examples and try to count from 1 - 33, you're jumping all over
<fantasai> iank_: also a bunch of issues wrt spanning items
<fantasai> iank_: so the proposal is to drop this sub-feature
<fantasai> fantasai: We're OK with dropping. If it seems that we need to do something like this in the future, we can explore it then
<fantasai> dholbert: Seems fine to me, too
<fantasai> astearns: proposal is to drop align-tracks/justify-tracks from Masonry spec
<fantasai> astearns: objections?
<fantasai> RESOLVED: Drop align-tracks, justify-tracks from Masonry spec