Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-ui-4] Change the pointer cursor to indicate any interactive element.

To add a little more nuance to @FremyCompany , while browsers have indeed said that their answer to the question of whether it is a good idea to use the pointer cursor on things other than links, this does not make pages that do that non conformant. It merely makes them bad ideas according to Apple and Microsoft (and people who agree with them).

Yes, there is a value judgement implied here, and the spec is recommending that cursors made for links are used (only) on links. But this is not a matter of author conformance.

There would be no need to have a cursor property at all if authors could not change the cursors to suit their tastes.

Effectively, you can read the whole cursor section of the spec as

> When the author picks the xxx cursor, the UA must render the cursor in a way that suggests yyy, which typically look like zzz.
> Note: Which cursor to use when is subjective, and authors are free to make that choice. However, authors should generally not use a cursor that suggests yyy if they don't mean yyy.

I would rather not rewrite the whole cursor section to make that more obvious than it currently is, as I don't think this would have much of an impact in practice, and I'd hate to accidentally change the meaning of text that has been stable for the better part of 20 years.

PS: I don't think author conformance is a particularly interesting topic in CSS in general. There are, in various specs, cases of "please don't do that", but the behavior needs to be fully defined anyway for interoperability, and those are best understood as advice on best practices, rather than rules to be blindly enforced. Most such things require human judgement anyway.


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Received on Thursday, 10 May 2018 04:06:41 UTC