Re: [css-ui] outline-stye: auto

Thanks David,

To be clear, the laughably verbose part is in our documentation, not
necessarily in the spec. Your clarification above helps a great deal,
thanks! We'll be sure to include it in the documentation.

~Scott



On Wed, Oct 23, 2013 at 6:33 AM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:

> On Thursday 2013-10-17 11:38 -0700, Scott Rowe wrote:
> > At the Web Platform Doc Sprint in Amsterdam on October 12th, we were
> > documenting the new *auto* value for the *outline-style* property,
> > described in the CSS Basic User Interface Module Level 3 (CSS3 UI) [1].
> [...]
> > The specification reads as follows: "The ‘auto’ value permits the user
> > agent to render a custom outline style, typically a style which is
> either a
> > user interface default for the platform, or perhaps a style that is
> richer
> > than can be described in detail in CSS, e.g. a rounded edge outline with
> > semi-translucent outer pixels that appears to glow. As such, this
> > specification does not define how the ‘outline-color’ is incorporated or
> > used (if at all) when rendering ‘auto’ style outlines. User agents may
> > treat ‘auto’ as ‘solid’."
> >
> > This description, besides being laughably verbose, points out a clear
> > problem with the spec: it does not specify a operand to which the
> > *auto*value resolves.
>
> I don't see why you think it's laughably verbose, nor do I see why
> you think there's a problem with the spec, nor do I know what you
> mean by an operand.
>
> The value is intended to allow user-agents to draw focus outlines in
> an appropriate platform-native style, or in some other appropriate
> style if there is no platform-native style.  That requires giving a
> bunch of latitude since we don't know exactly what the
> platform-native style looks like.
>
> -David
>
> --
> 𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
> 𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
>              Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
>              What I was walling in or walling out,
>              And to whom I was like to give offense.
>                - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)
>