RE: Scientific notation in numbers

> From: Håkon Wium Lie [mailto:howcome@opera.com]
> Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 12:00 PM
> To: Sylvain Galineau
> Cc: www-style@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Scientific notation in numbers


> 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.

Selectors have been used for this purpose for years with much more power. It is one 
of the primary ways to 'select' or exclude older versions of IE. Any of the newer CSS3
Selectors is also a switch to exclude IE8 and earlier. Not only are these hacks used,
they are much more powerful than tinkering with value syntax on a property-by-property
basis. If we're OK with specifying and deploying CSS3 Selectors over years then the
horse left this barn a long time ago.

Now, it could also be that you don't mind hacks as long as they're to IE's detriment
but are very much opposed to those that may exclude older version of your own browser but
that'd just be crazy talk, right ? :)

 
> 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? :-)

I'm sure someone at Opera can come up with some Dragonfly inspector doodad so
you never have to see this form. (chaals might call this 'debuggering')

The point was that I already had no idea what it meant even without scientific
notation. It's - to me - unreadable regardless of the value notation. 

> 
> 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/


As hard as I find it to read, I kind of like the feature.

Received on Thursday, 11 February 2010 20:34:12 UTC