- From: Albert Lunde <Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 12:55:41 -0500 (CDT)
- To: www-style@www10.w3.org, www-html@www10.w3.org
> > >Comments? Ideas? Should I present a more technical specification? I would > > >imagine the language would be a touched-up subset of the current CSS proposal. I assume you mean: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Style/css/draft.html I guess this seems as reasonable as any other place to start. I'd suggest that before encouraging experimentation, a couple of things should be addressed. If there are going to be multiple style-sheet languages or dialects (as many suggest, though I have my doubts) we should try to make clear how the correct style sheets and "dialect" can be determined with HTML and HTTP. I'd like a consistent mechanism defined for this early on if everything else is going to be babble. If we write up a subset of a style sheet language, we should try to define a precise syntax/grammer (with BNF or whatever) for parsing the language, and if possible make this general enough to deal with the whole language. (Some other proposals may address this, but I didn't see anything in the CSS document about grammer.) We ought to address (as in HTML or more so) the question of dealing with unknown extensions (and distingushing them from errors). It would also be good to consider language features that make it easier to recover from/localize parsing errors. Either requiring a statement terminator like a semi-colon or adopting a one-statement-per-line syntax with an explicit continuation indicator would help in this context. And even though we may not want to encourage fancy stuff in a simple subset, something may need to be said about the processing model of the language to make conditional or context-dependent features work consistently. I.e. is this a purely declaritive language, a procedural language or what? (Pardon me if I'm going over old ground here: I just want to stress that a well-defined framework is important when we start talking about many implementations.) -- Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu
Received on Thursday, 27 July 1995 13:55:51 UTC