Re: Splitting up the spec

Jonas Sicking wrote:
> There is always going to be things in any given specification that some
> people don't need.

Agreed; but if the spec is long, then you don't want many people for whom
the majority of the spec is unneeded.  Or, at the very least, you want to
make it as clear as possible which parts they can ignore, even before
they start reading.

> if I don't care about CSS I won't care about <style>,
> <div>, <span>, rel=stylesheet, or style="...".

To me, that case is a good argument for the split.

The Markup Semantics spec should define them, so that you can look
them up for reference, if you find them elsewhere.  You probably won't
use them, but the definitions are short enough that they won't be a problem.

On the other hand, if the spec included all of CSS inline under the definition
of the <style> element ... that would not be so good.

Please look at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/present/styles.html
How much of that still seems like it should really be in HTML itself?

To me, it looks like large portions really ought to have been left for CSS
to define.  For example, Content-Style-Type appears in that document,
and one other in my entire cache.  ... That HTML section provides
(normative?) information about how to write a CSS style, but you still
need to go to the CSS spec anyhow to get a list of valid property values.

At the time, these parts seemed unavoidably entwined -- they needed
to give examples, after all.  But with the passage of time ... maybe
just referring to CSS wouldn't have been such a burden after all.

-jJ

Received on Sunday, 23 November 2008 05:40:26 UTC