RE: Scientific notation in numbers

Also sprach Sylvain Galineau:

 > > That's good, my understanding was that some people in the telcon
 > > argued why using this for browser sniffing was a good thing.
 > 
 > I certainly did not and do not consider a good thing. But as it's possible to use
 > it that way - intentionally or not - it deserves to be brought up as part of the 
 > decision.

That I agree with. If this is added to CSS, I think we'll see things
like:

  body { font: 14px/18px boring-old-font }
  body { font: 14e0px/18e0px shiny-new-font }

This kind of sniffing is unprecise; it's unlikely that browsers
accepting the scientific notation will support the same features in
other areas.

 > Another example: in its current form, your border-clip proposal in
 > GCPM results in things like:
 > 
 >  border-clip-top: 3fr 10px 2fr 10px 1fr 10px 10px 10px 1fr 10px 2fr 10px 3fr; 

Far too simple. It will be:

  border-clip-top: 3e0fr 1000e-2px .002E2fr 1000000E-5px 1e0fr etc. etc. 

Did I mention it gives me a headache? :-)

BTW, The first implementation of border-clip is in the works [1]. I
believe fractions are not supported by this implementation. It may be
that fractions are too complex. In any case, adding a new unit (like
fractions) is a small change compared to changing how numbers are
represented in all of CSS.

[1] http://www.princexml.com/roadmap/

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          CTO °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Thursday, 11 February 2010 20:01:02 UTC