Comments on section 7.2 of css3-text

Section 7.2 of css3-text deals with white-space control in rendering. As 
it stands, the draft betrays a heavy bias towards XML. Since the intention 
of CSS is to provide a styling language that can be applied to a document 
tree created from any structured document format, I have endeavoured to 
correct this in the introductory text.

The corrections I propose are as follows:

First paragraph: after "interpreted for rendering", replace "purpose" with 
"purposes." Between "purpose." and "The white-space set", insert the 
sentence "White-space characters are those which may be used to separate 
markup without affecting the information content of the document. 
Different languages may assign different characters for this role." Also, 
insert "Note: " and move the next sentence, beginning with "The 
white-space set" into a new paragraph. In that sentence, replace "is 
determined by" with "of", insert "is defined" between "specification" 
and "as", and delete "being". Add the sentence "In SGML-based languages, 
these characters are the SEPCHAR function characters."

Second paragraph: delete this paragraph (Note: [HTML401]...).

Third paragraph: delete this paragraph.

Fourth paragraph: delete this paragraph, and replace with the following 
sentences: "Definitions of whitespace usually encompass end-of-line 
characters, which are generally represented as carriage returns (U+000D), 
line feeds (U+000A), or carriage return-line feed pairs. While this 
document treats end-of-line characters as if they were a single line feed 
(as is the case in parsed XML documents), the operation of these 
properties should be independent of the representation of end-of-line 
characters." Insert a new paragraph following: "Note: Languages such as 
XML and SGML mandate the removal of certain whitespace characters through 
processes such as record handling and attribute value normalization. This 
whitespace is outside the scope of these properties, as it is eliminated 
during the parsing that creates the document tree."

Fifth paragraph: replace "white-space procesing rules" with "white-space 
rendering rules".

Sixth paragraph: replace "initial white-space processing" with "initial 
white-space rendering".

I think these changes will preserve the intention of the recommendation 
while maintaining suitable abstraction from any particular markup language.

-- 
Chris Hoess
Mozilla QA Flunky

Received on Wednesday, 29 May 2002 06:47:53 UTC