Re: Standardizing de-facto behavior built on an optional or undefined specification

I agree with you. When such undefined behavior is
left in the spec, it's often because nobody found a
reasonable reason to implement or to impose a
particular behaviour to other implementors.

If, after some time, everybody seems to agree on
a common behavior about a specific edge case, it
would indeed be great to have the spec updated
to reflect this "de-facto" standards, as you say.

--------------------------------------------------
From: "James Hopkins" <james@idreamincode.co.uk>
Sent: Sunday, December 27, 2009 10:56 PM
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Subject: Standardizing de-facto behavior built on an optional or undefined 
specification

> I've recently come across several sections of the CSS 2.1 spec [1]  which 
> describe behavior that is either intentionally undefined or  optional (per 
> RFC2119), and have already commented on one of these  issues in a previous 
> email [2].
>
> After some testing, and in both examples, the four main browsers (FF, 
> Safari, IE, & Opera) have adopted comparable implementations, and  appear 
> to exhibit identical behavior. In these cases, I believe it  would be 
> beneficial to standardize this established behavior in order  to prevent 
> possible interoperability issues for authors (who have  become reliant on 
> it), which may arise from retaining the definitions  found in the current 
> specification.
>
> [1] Scaling of replaced elements 
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visudet.html#the-width-property ), position 
> and tiling of 'background-image' applied to inline  elements 
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/colors.html#background-properties)
>
> [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2009Nov/0324.html
>

Received on Monday, 28 December 2009 12:15:47 UTC