Device Independence Content selection

I have the following comments on the specification draft
http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-cselection-20050502/

1. The spec allows you to ask questions about the size of the window, and
about the display size (resolution and colours) of the entire device. This
seems of limited use except in allowing authors to determine a layout for
the fullscreen and then if there is a difference just put in a message
like "move to fullscreen to get the page". This seems to me a bad thing to
encourage. I am wondering if there are things that make it more useful?
(The only one I could think of was knowing that if the user is at
fullscreen they don't see other windows, etc... I am not sure if this
should be exposed to authors...)

2. There is no clear way in the spec of finding out the user's font size.
Most modern browsers have implemented a minimum font size setting, because
users wanted it. Finding out what that is would be extremely helpful for
authors, whereas just giving them the pixel size of the screen forces them
to make guesses about the font size being used.

3. Section 4.3 discusses the use of selid as an attribute that
allows you to specify something which will turn into an ID in the result
document - repeating it for several alternative pieces of content. When
this is converted, the spec requires a default attribute name to be
specified. It seems more sensible to default to xml:id. Instead the
specification talks of a language profile that "somehow" defines the
attribute that this should become, but does not appear to specify anywhere
how this actually occurs or what such a profile looks like. As an  
alternative
to xml:id as a default, it would seem important to clearly specify how such
a profile is constructed

4. Section 9.12.2 describes the function of a test for resolution, but
simply says that it is a decimal number. It should give units, which
apparently (from the explanation in an example, explicitly marked
informative) are intended to be dpi.

5. Section 5.8 allows the author to control re-rendering, by suppressing
the ability to recalculate what content should be included. This seems
like a bad idea, since while it can be used to allow an author to force a
user into a particular font size, window configuration, etc, I don't see
any positive effects for it.

6. Navigating the specification document would have been easier with at  
least a link
element to its table of contents

Cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile                              chaals@opera.com
          hablo español - je parle français - jeg lærer norsk
   Here's one we prepared earlier:   http://www.opera.com/download

Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2005 16:34:36 UTC