Re: font property (was: order of properties)

On 12 Mar 2003, at 23:59, Ian wrote:

> On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Ernest Cline wrote:
>
> > The following productions: [...]
> >
> >    font:italic fantasy;
> >
> > would clearly correspond to the following valid CSS: [...]
> >
> >    font: italic medium fantasy;
> >
> > Can anyone explain why font-size is a required component of font?
> 
> Why does the above example not map to:
> 
>    font: medium "italic fantasy";

Because I assumed that whitespace in a font name meant that it must be 
quoted instead of should as per the spec. I need to stop assuming so 
much. :(

Since backward compatability is more important than a minor improvement 
in usability, I can see that my reasonable change in the specification 
of font is not possible bacause of that. It would be possible to amend 
it so that the required components are <font-family> and one of:
<font-size> | [/ <line-height>] | [<font-size> / <line-height>]
but I don't think that the extra code required to implement that would 
be worth it. (After all, how often is someone going to want to specify 
both the fant-family and the line-height but not the font-size?)

Can anyone explain why the decision was made way back when CSS1 was 
created to not require quoting of font-families that contain whitespace 
in their name? Not doing so amkes a parser for the rule more 
complicated and keeps font from acting like other shorthand properties.

Received on Thursday, 13 March 2003 23:31:11 UTC