Re: css21 list-style-type dropped types

On Sat, 8 Nov 2003, Tex Texin wrote:

> The section on list-style-type no longer references several international
> styles.
- -
> They have been implemented by some browsers.

A few, but CSS 2.1 apparently tries to cover CSS du jour as implemented by
most browsers as counted by frequency of use, and a little more. This is a
somewhat debatable move, but it has good practical reasons. In any case,
deviating from the basic idea in some details tends to lead to confusion
and could make CSS 2.1 lose its point and identity.

> Were these intentionally dropped?

Most probably.

> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html#q51

But it probably wasn't intentional to omit this from the list of changes.

You might have some arguments in favor of restoring lower-greek, which
is supported e.g. by Mozilla at least from version 1.2 onwards.

Luckily they have restored lower-alpha and upper-alpha, which were dropped
in an earlier CSS 2.1 draft. It would have been a bad idea to omit them,
since they, and not the synonyms lower-latin and upper-latin, are
supported by IE. However on the same grounds it would make sense to drop
the latter. It's worse than futile to give authors two alternatives when
we know that one of them is supported by the browser that is by far most
popular today and in the near future and the other is not, and there are
probably no examples of the opposite problem. It is true that -latin is
more _logical_ than -alpha for referring to the Latin alphabet, but such a
matter of principle should be ignored here. After all, the names of CSS
properties and values don't really constitute a coherent, logical set
anyway.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Saturday, 8 November 2003 16:39:23 UTC