comments on sections 2.2, 4, and 5.4 of CSS2 draft

Thank you for allowing me to comment on CSS2. I have been following the
discussion and find it very interesting to say the least. I appologize for
commenting about color recently. It was inappropriate for me to comment on
the discussion instead of directly to the draft CSS2 document. I work for a
paint and coatings company and find the color discussion very interesting.
I can see that many of you have never matched colors before.

The following comments are mostly in the form of questions.  The draft
document is very nice and utilizes many hyperlinks. A lot of the document I
believe is unclear. It would appear that prior knowledge of CSS is required
to understand it. And quite frankly, some statements are just plain
confusing:

Section 2.2 Design principles behind CSS2 - what are they? Did you start
out with a set of design principles? Why not state them? How can we judge
the balance of the document without them? Are you meeting your objectives?
How does CSS work? 

Section 4.1 - Tokenization - you lost me on this one. Please define it in
your document. What does it have to do with syntax anyway? 

What are 'Lex-style regular expressions? Or 'Unicode' for that matter. So
what are they to me...quite frankly nothing at this point. Ask yourself: So
what?

Section 4.1.1 'CSS style sheets consist of a sequence of tokens.'
Section 4.1.3 'A CSS style sheet, for any version of CSS, consists of a
list of statements(see the grammer above). There are two kinds of
statements: at-rules and rule sets.'
Er, which one is it? 

Are macros, blocks? Or are blocks, macros? Or are they declarations?

It appears that @rules and rule sets (selector declaration) have been lost
(importance is now obscure) within section 4. You should rewrite this
section to tell us the basic structure of CSS statements (I think it is the
@rules, rule sets, and comments, and then describe the 'stuff'.

Section 5.4 rendering objects: how does a UA determine a particular
rendering object? 'A rendering object is defined by a set of CSS
properties.' If a particular CSS property is applicable to two or more
rendering objects, then which one (rendering object) does the UA select? Is
it a magical selection?

Again thanks for the opportunity to comment.

Sincerely,

John L. Kemmis

Received on Monday, 8 December 1997 15:54:27 UTC