Re: block-based parsing?

Been a while since I actually got in on a discussion, but this one seems 
interesting.

I'm gonna have to agree that, imo, the browsers can't really be trusted 
to tell the truth about what they genuinely support and what they don't.

I'll tell you what I think disturbs me the most at this point.  CSS 
seems to have no... cohesion.  Which is probably where all the talk of 
versioning always starts.  I don't think that versioning will fix the 
issue (since the issue lies with the browser engineers and not with the 
standards engineers).

What I really think will fix the issue is this:

The browser engineers are always reaching toward the css standards, 
trying to implement them (at least the folks everywhere except MS are, 
and well... we'll see if I can include them after version 7 or not) 
point being, how much reaching back is the WG doing?  I'll admit that 
I'm ignorant about this.  I ask the question because I don't know how 
much reaching back the WG IS doing.  Sure there are write ups about what 
the standards include and how they should act, but are we actively 
supporting the folks who might benefit from such support?  Or do the 
programmers of Gecko and the like toil away in a bubble just 
interpretting the documents produced by the WG on their own and trying 
to implement them without 3rd party (the WG) help?  Perhaps (and again, 
I may simply be ignorant of what's already being done) we just need to 
be more active in offering our support to the browser engineers?

I realize I've suggested something that's well... huge, but could this 
help?  Could this bring cohesion to the CSS renderers?  Love to hear 
some response, even if it's just to educate me on what we may already be 
doing.

Kris

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> 
> Quoting Orion Adrian <orion.adrian@gmail.com>:
> 
>> Browsers can't be trusted to accurately say what features they do and
>> don't support. So they may say they support a feature and go ahead
>> with the properties in the block, but it won't in reality support it
>> and you'll end up with a mess.
> 
> 
> Without a testcase for every possible situation browsers will never 
> know. So
> yes, you will likely end up with a mess. Same mess as the hasFeature DOM 
> method
> is now...
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Anne
> 
>

Received on Tuesday, 13 September 2005 16:00:47 UTC