Re: Collapsing 0 width margin; CSS version system

David Woolley wrote:
>>That is only the case because CSS lacks a standard method of version
>>control (for lack of the proper term) -- the CSS equivalent of a doctype
>>declaration. Isn't that the case?
> 
> These problems are not to do with a scalar version.  They are the result
> of partial implementations, faulty implementations with large market
> share, and designers who never read and understand source documents, so
> fail to understand that certain things are deliberately not specified,
> in order to allow different implementation approaches, but then expect
> everyone else to follow the market leader.

If that is a given, not the ideal situation but the real-world
situation, shouldn't you accept that for a fact and keep it into account
when designing a specification?


> The result is that a browser will typically be at an implementation
> extension level in one area, CSS2 in another, CSS3 in yet another,
> CSS1 elswhere, broken in places, technically compliant but constrained
> by display technology in such a way as not to be able to meet designer
> expectations, in places, etc.  There are no complete CSS 2 implementations,
> and probably no complete CSS 2.1 ones.
> 
> Also, extremely few HTML documents have valid doctypes, and, for most
> well formed HTML it is not possible to specify one because the browser
> developers don't publish DTDs for their extensions, but most commercial
> HTML uses those extensions.  That suggests that the presence of version
> information would be so unreliable as to be useless.

I'd say versioning CSS is not as much for the purpose of validation, as
it a means to enable breaking existing specifications, 'start over' with
things that appeared to be not such-a-good-idea afterwards after all,
and clean things up which have become messy because backwards
compatibility needs to be retained. Like the collapsing of zero-width
margins this discussion was about (note that I do not really have an
opinion on whether this case is one of those not-so-good-ideas - I at
least never encountered it as a problem so far) (also note that I don't
have a real opinion about versioning, but at first sight it looks like a
reasonable idea :)).


~Grauw

-- 
Ushiko-san! Kimi wa doushite, Ushiko-san!!

Received on Sunday, 9 January 2005 17:32:25 UTC