Re: [CSS21] Unclear applicability to XML

On Thu, 25 Aug 2005, Chris Lilley wrote:
> 
> The abstract says that CSS 2.1 is for "to structured documents (e.g., 
> HTML documents and XML applications)" but then removes items (relative 
> to CSS2.0) such as @font-face because they have not been implemented in 
> HTML browsers, regardless of whether they have been implemented with XML 
> applications.
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-CSS21-20050613/
> 
> and yet later it says
> 
>    CSS2.1 aims to reflect what CSS features are reasonably widely
>    implemented for HTML and XML languages in general (rather than only
>    for a particular XML language, or only for HTML)
>    http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-CSS21-20050613/about.html#q1

The implementations of @font-face we found were either very incomplete 
implementations or implementations that only implemented very limited 
subparts of CSS (such as only the parts required by SVG). Our CR exit 
criteria requires significantly better implementations than were available 
for @font-face as far as we could tell. In addition, we have neither a 
decent test suite for @font-face nor any volunteers to write one, which 
would be another problem with moving @font-face through to REC in CSS2.1.

The @font-face feature in CSS2 is still in CSS2, and is also covered by a 
CSS3 spec for which, if I am not mistaken, you are the editor. Therefore 
we do not see any difficulty in the removal of this feature.

CSS2.1 is intended for applications that style structured documents, be 
they based on SGML or XML or another tree-based format. However, our 
primary concern is with full implementations of CSS, not implementations 
of subparts of CSS required by other specifications, as it is the 
complete implementations that will help us exit CR. (It doesn't really 
matter if we have interoperability on one half of the spec in one set of 
UAs and another half of the spec in another set of UAs -- that would be 
pretty worthless for Web authors!)

Your comment did not make any specific requests; please let us know if the 
above explanations answered your feedback or if you would like us to make 
specific changes.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Sunday, 28 August 2005 17:16:55 UTC