Re: Comments on Working Draft 26-July-96

Bert Bos wrote:
>Liam Quin wrote:

[snip]

> That's a good point. I've been using the following construction
> myself:
> 
>     <acronym>HTML</acronym>
> 
>     ACRONYM {
>         text-transform: lowercase;
>         font-style: small-caps }
> 
> but the danger is that one property may be working while the other
> fails, leaving exactly the wrong result in the output. A way of
> ensuring that the two operations are interdependent seems called
> for. I think you interpreted `small-caps' to be that atomic operation?

If you specify that the worst failure mode for small-caps should be to
use capital letters, which is not much worse than shrunken capital
letters, then the results shouldn't be too bad.  The possible failure
cases are then

1) small-caps but no text-transform -> caps-with-small-caps (effectively
	caps, if you capitalized the original text)
2) text-transform with broken small-caps -> caps
3) no text-transform with broken small-caps -> caps
4) neither -> what you would have had anyway (caps, if you were
	smart and thought of this possibility in advance)
I think that an author could live with any of these, even if (s)he
didn't like them as much as what was specified.

>  > 5.4.7 text indent
>  > 
>  >     Why only the 1st line?  Why not specify n lines?  Seems a little
>  >     arbitrary, that's all.  Not important.
> 
> Another thing we left out of CSS1. There must be something left to add
> later...
> 

Yes, but if you specfy how you're going to add it now (maybe just an
additional number added to the current text-indent description) you
could prevent a lot of CSS parsers from breaking on your new syntax.
The only way to add it later while keeping the new syntax from confusing
current CSS parsers (so that they ignore the text-indent altogether) is
to make multi-line text-indent a totally different property than
single-line text-indent.

>  > 5.5.3 border-url
>  > 
>  >     Why only 1 image and not 8?  Most border fonts have 8 characters that
>  >     are used for the border -- one for each corner, and one for each side.
>  >     For that matter, why can't I specify a font and a string?
> 
> Using characters for the border is a whole different model. Using 8
> images is quite possible but again something for the longer term.
> 

You can specify four images now, using border-top/right/bottom/left
instead of border.  That gets CSS halfway to what Lee suggested.

>  > 5.6.2 list-style
>  > 
>  >     Note that `disc' (or `disk' in North America) is not the same as
>  >     `bullet', as a bullet in a condenssed or italic or oblique font is
>  >     not circular!
>  > 
>  >     One should be able to specify a character from a font at a given size
>  >     and weight, together perhaps with ALT text.
> 
> Yes, also on our list of future extensions.
> 
> (I've seen `disc' in American texts as well, including in Netscape's
> attributes. Are you sure this a British versus American distinction?)

Disc is definitely British, disk is definitely American.  Canadians do use
British spellings and live in North America, but they aren't real Americans
(and don't want to be - the main thing that unites the country is that
no Canadian wants to join with their neighbors to the South, eh?).  It is
a bit curious that only citizens of the USA are called Americans, while
America itself is composed of two continents and may other countries, and
we weren't even the first inhabitants (who are now called Indians for no
doubt equally silly reasons).

David Seibert

Received on Tuesday, 3 September 1996 11:33:44 UTC