[Bug 17509] New: Include sign in NUMBER, PERCENTAGE, and DIMENSION tokens

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=17509

           Summary: Include sign in NUMBER, PERCENTAGE, and DIMENSION
                    tokens
           Product: CSS
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: All
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: CSS Level 2
        AssignedTo: bert@w3.org
        ReportedBy: antonsforums@yahoo.co.uk
         QAContact: public-css-bugzilla@w3.org


Reported by Tab Atkins Jr. and fantasai

In 4.1 and G.2, the NUMBER, PERCENTAGE, and DIMENSION tokens (amongst others in
G.2 such as LENGTH and ANGLE) depend on the {num} macro which is defined as

  # num     [0-9]+|[0-9]*\.[0-9]+
in 4.2, and as

  # num     [0-9]+|[0-9]*"."[0-9]+
in G.2.

The optional leading + or - sign that can be used with these tokens is
tokenized as a separated DELIM token, and is combined with the following token
during parsing.

This implies that you can insert a comment between the sign and the number. 
This is undesirable for the following reasons:

1. It's unintuitive and doesn't serve much useful purpose;
2. It's not interoperable, since Gecko and PrinceXML both parse the sign as 3.
part of the NUMBER/etc token, whilst other UAs seem to follow the spec;
3. It makes it difficult for spec authors to talk about numbers and such in
grammar terms, because they must always remember to also allow an optional + or
- DELIM preceding the tokens.

Conversation begins:
Bug report:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2012Apr/0639.html

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Received on Saturday, 16 June 2012 11:08:48 UTC