Re: indents

nemo/Joel N. Weber II wrote:
> 
>    Date: Tue, 15 Apr 1997 19:50:04 -0400
>    From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
> 
>    Is not the fact that the paragraph is first a sufficient differentiation
>    from the other paragraphs? Why duplicate that information?
> 
> It's not clear to me exactly what the definition of a first paragraph
> is.
[example elided]

  I think this is the biggest problem with the current CSS
specification; it is difficult to specify enough contextual
relationship between elements to support all reasonable cases.
  A child-of operator needs to be available for selectors, so that we
can write:

  div.major <child-of> p:first-paragraph { ... }

  I see that this was deferred to "later revisions," but that's not
very satisfactory.  Another possibility, perhaps that should be
available in addition to rather than instead of the <child-of>
operator, would be to support grouping and negation:

  div.major <not> div.minor p:first-paragraph { ... }

could be used to specify the first paragraph in the intro to a major
section (assume <not> is tightly bound).  Also,

  div.major <not> (div.minor div.technical) p:first-paragraph { ... }

would apply to the first paragraph which was contained anywhere so
long as it wasn't a section targetted for tech-heads buried within a
minor section; other div.technical elements would not cause the
exclusion, and p:first-paragraph elements not in a div.minor would not
be excluded.  Of course, this could be done without grouping with:

  div.major div.minor <not> div.technical p:first-paragraph,
  div.major <not> div.minor div.technical p:first-paragraph { ... }



  -Fred

--
Fred L. Drake, Jr.
fdrake@cnri.reston.va.us
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive
Reston, VA    20191-5434

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 1997 09:23:39 UTC