[css-counter-styles] 2^15 limits

If we're allowing for implementations to use a 16-bit int to represent a bound,
then how would a bound of 'infinite' be represented?  I suggest we allow
implementations the option of using 16-bit int values -2^15 and 2^15-1 for
this purpose, and thus suggest narrowing the required supported range to
[-2^15 + 1, 2^15 - 2].

That said, I vaguely recall that 2^15 had some other significance, perhaps
being the range of counter values that implementations had to support in CSS
2.1 or something.


Apart from that, there are also a few nits in this paragraph; nothing
important, but most of them look easy enough to fix:

  - Literally speaking, 'infinite' is "a bound greater than the
    implementation's supported bounds", but we presumably don't want it to be
    "treated as specifying the implementation's maximum supported bound."
    I suggest inserting the word ‘integer’.

  - "If a range ... then it must be treated as specifying the implementation's
    maximum supported bound" suggests that it's the range that should be so
    treated, rather than just the bound.  Not a big problem, but it's easy to
    fix: I suggest removing the "range" part of that sentence, i.e. just "If a
    bound is specified...".

  - It would be nice to find a wording that more obviously conveys magnitude,
    at least for the "maximum supported bound" part (which fairly strongly
    suggests just the upper bound, on first reading), and to a lesser extent
    also the earlier "lower bound of at least" part.  That earlier one is
    actually the easier to fix, e.g. "at least as negative as".  Maybe the
    other could be something like "is outside of the supported bounds, then it
    must be treated as the closest bound that the implementation does support".

pjrm.

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 13:22:08 UTC