Re: [css-logical-props] Is this spec ready to ship?

On Friday 2016-12-16 18:24 +1100, Peter Moulder wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 16, 2016 at 09:00:27AM +1100, Peter Moulder wrote:
> 
> > Firefox shipping unprefixed something that doesn't even have a WD,
> > without even posting a message to www-style [...] ?
> 
> I am very sorry: I see that this was indeed discussed in a telcon quite some
> time ago (2015-07-01,
> http://www.w3.org/mid/CADhPm3t6TJbUN4HrJ+bVGieHFbmEO8gRoWcsoT5orEQm=q5TeQ@mail.gmail.com
> )
> 
> The reason given was that shipping vertical writing modes somehow depended
> on logical props for Firefox.  (The minutes don't show why it needed to be
> unprefixed; though the minutes do note that it had been shipping behind a
> flag for quite some time prior.)

And there was also my email to www-style the following day:
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2015Jul/0040.html

The reason for the dependency is that the UA style sheet needs to do
appropriate things in the presence of logical properties.

I suppose we could have restricted this to UA style sheets only, but
that would have made developer tools confusing and possibly somewhat
broken, and also prevented developers from doing the things we do in
our own UA sheets.  We could have prefixed it, except we're trying
not to introduce any more prefixes to the Web.  And it didn't seem
worth doing either given that the parts that we shipped were, in
fact, believed by the working group to be quite stable (and had been
stable for quite a while at that point); they were just mixed in a
working draft with other much-less-stable things.

In particular, the parts we shipped were only logical aliases for
existing physical properties.  So the things we were depending on to
be stable were:
 (a) the names of those new properties
 (b) how logical and physical prpoerties cascade together
I believe we conservatively didn't ship computed style for logical
properties since it wasn't clear whether the WG would want that
(although I can't find any contemporaneous evidence documenting that
rationale; we simply left bug 1116638 unfixed).

This work was implemented in:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=649142%2C1083134%2C1117983%2C1120283%2C1120284&list_id=13352228

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)