Backwards compatibility of new selectors (was: Color models and CSS2 in general)

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At 10:11 AM 02/12/97 -0500, Douglas Rand wrote:
>1) Adding specifiers which are dependent on parents and siblings is
>making a non-backward compatible change to the spec.  I don't remember
>a hook which made things with funky syntax be rejected.

The CSS1 Recommendation states that "A ruleset that starts with a selector-
string that is not valid CSS1 is skipped." [1]  Since the ~ and / 
characters are not permitted in a CSS1 selector-string unless escaped by a 
backslash [1], a selector such as /MATH ~ P/ will cause the entire ruleset 
to be ignored in CSS1 browsers.

>Users with
>first generation agents are going to be pretty upset when CSS2 pages
>render poorly on their browser.

If by "first generation" you mean claiming to support CSS1, then I think 
there's a much more serious problem:  Users with first generation agents 
are going to be pretty upset when they find out their browsers don't 
really support CSS1.

>In fact the syntax for CSS2 had better
>be forward and backward compatible.

I believe it is.  The forward-compatibility requirements of CSS1 are very 
well thought out.  Too bad browser vendors haven't implemented them.
 
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#forward-compatible-parsing

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--
Liam Quinn
Web Design Group            Enhanced Designs, Web Site Development
http://www.htmlhelp.com/    http://enhanced-designs.com/

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 1997 14:53:30 UTC