Re: Procedural (non-technical) point about freezing the cat and hat combinators before they've even been defined (was Re: Shadow DOM: Hat and Cat -- if that's your real name.)

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On Feb 4, 2014, at 18:22 , Edward O'Connor <eoconnor@apple.com> wrote:

> +www-archive, replies just to www-archive (since this non-technical)
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Tab wrote:
> 
>> Chrome *will* be shipping Shadow DOM publicly (in conjunction with
>> Moz) in the *very near* future. Whatever API gets shipped will be
>> frozen almost immediately. If you want to suggest name changes, as we
>> brainstormed a bit at the f2f, do so RIGHT NOW or forever hold your
>> peace.
> 
> In the CSS WG we've historically allowed implementations to ship
> unprefixed properties when the spec containing those properties hits CR.
> Selector combinators are a funny case—they can't be prefixed—so we
> should be extra careful about shipping them prematurely.
> 
> But as far as I can tell, these combinators *aren't even specced*, much
> less in a spec that's hit (or will soon hit) CR. This seems highly
> irregular.
> 
> I assumed ^ and ^^ would be defined in Selectors 4. But they're not in
> its latest WD:
> 
>                    http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors4/
> 
> Nor in its latest ED:
> 
>                  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/selectors4/
> 
> Nor are they in the latest Shadow DOM WD:
> 
>                    http://www.w3.org/TR/shadow-dom/
> 
> Nor in its ED:
> 
>         http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/shadow/#styles
> 
> No, wait, they're in there. In Chapter 6 "Styles" we find this:
> 
>> ISSUE 6
>> Hats, ^, and Cats, ^^, selector combinators should be defined in this
>> section.
> 
> I'm left with the conclusion that these combinators are entirely
> undefined. I'm really surprised the Chrome team intends to ship these
> enabled by default in production.
> 
> 
> Ted
> 

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2014 23:56:25 UTC