- From: Ian Hickson <exxieh@bath.ac.uk>
- Date: Sat, 25 Apr 1998 20:51:09 +0100
- To: Chris Lilley <chris@w3.org>
- Cc: Dataweaver <traveler@io.com>, Steven Pemberton <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl>, www-style@w3.org
[SNIP SNIP SNIP] >Why is that scary? One of the things that CSS2 aims to do is have better >internationalization than CSS1. [SNIP SNIP SNIP] When I say 'dodgy', 'scary', and so on, I was not referring to the underlying idea (attibute selectors) but to the actual characters representing the operator. I am absolutely positively supporting the idea of being able to match items in a space separated list case sensitively, and hyphen separated lists case insensitvely. Please understand that that is *not* where (IMHO) the problem lies. The problem is the actual syntax that has been chosen. >It would be ad-hoc if we had made up the unordered space-separated list >attribute and the hierarchical hyphen-separated atribute ourselves, and >if they were just as likely or unlikely as any other separator. They >aren't, and we didn't. These things already existed. We just invented >short, declarative ways to get at these pre-existing things. It is these 'short, declarative ways' which are my problem. In four years, there will be a need for case sensitive, tilde separated matching. And the logical syntax would be [att~=val]. But we won't be able to use this, and [att?=val] will be selected. And it will get worse and worse. We have the option, *now*, to make this system clear and logical. >You still really want regexps, don't you ;-) Well yes, but I am trying to settle for less... -- Ian Hickson -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 Info: www.geekcode.com GIT/M/S d->-- s+: a--->? C++(+++)>$ U>*++++ P L+>+++++ E(+)>+++ W+++ N(+) o? K? w@ O- !M V- PS+ PE- Y+ PGP>+ t 5+++>++++ X- R+(+++) tv b++(+++) DI++ D++(---)>++++ G>+++ e(*)>+++++ h!()(--) !r y? ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------
Received on Saturday, 25 April 1998 16:19:36 UTC