Re: LC comment: Ambiguous "otherwise" step

Hi Micah,

Due to the way the meetings have fallen, and WWW2008, this issue is in
the tracker system, but hasn't been discussed in the group. So whilst
you can't take my following comments as an 'official' reply, I thought
I might as well float them by you, since if you're happy with the
answer we could probably close this pretty quickly on Thursday.

>  Section 5.5 step #4
>  >/otherwise/, if [parent object] is present, [new subject] is set to that
> /and/ the [skip element] flag is set to 'true';

Yes, you're right. The prose now makes it clearer what "set to that"
means, and also that this is two steps, rather than an 'and'
condition:

<em>otherwise</em>, if <tref>parent object</tref> is present,
<tref>new subject</tref> is set to the value of
<tref>parent object</tref>. Additionally...


>  Spec is unclear on what to do if processing gets to this final step and
> [parent object] is not "present"...

I suppose that's true, but there are many places where things just
'drop through'. The intent is that if nothing sets a flag, then there
is nothing to do.

> ...and ("present" should be more specific, e.g. "not null").

I think that's actually less clear. We're checking for the presence or
absence of an attribute, but without actually defining an algorithm or
DOM method to do that check. Testing for null seems to me to be
ambiguous as to whether we're testing the *value* of the attribute or
its presence.


>  Additionally, it seems like an error to set the [skip element] flag in this
> step. In the case of an element with @property and no other attributes, the
> element definitely shouldn't be skipped.

Yes...well spotted. :) So the second part of the prose is:

  Additionally, if <aref>property</aref> is <em>not</em> present then
the <tref>skip element</tref> flag is
  set to 'true';

Do you think these two sentences now look like what you need?

Regards,

Mark

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Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2008 14:38:28 UTC