comments on WD-css3-box-20010726

Hi,

   Some comments towards the CSS3 module 'the box model':

general:

  * I don't like most alt attribute values, they are descriptive rather
    than alternatives.

  * pseudo-elements should take the new CSS Level 3 syntax, i.e.
    ::before instead of :before

  * I don't see a good reason why some references are just placeholders;
    the relevant specifications are available like the multicolumn
    module

  * mark member-only links as such

3. Introduction and glossary:

[...]
  root box, root element 
  
  The box resp. element that has no parent box resp. element. The root
  element of the source document generates the root box. 
[...]

Why is the root box not generated by the root node instead of the root
element? Since the root box is said to be initially created by the user
agent, this makes at least to me more sense. Especially, the root node
cannot by selected with W3C Selectors so noone has a chance to affect
those.

[...]
  positioned box, positioned element 

  A box resp. element whose 'display-role' property is not 'none' and
  whose 'position' property is either 'absolute' or 'fixed'. A
  positioned element generates a positioned box. Note that 'position'
  does not apply to the root element. 
[...]

I suggest to adopt the CSS Level 2 definition, e.g. "with a 'position'
other than 'static'". The same goes for the following definitions.



4. The 'display', 'display-model' and 'display-role' properties:

  the example for "various types of boxes":

the example uses '<h3>' while the text uses 'H3'; even if it is HTML and
therefore case-insensitive, it should be consistent.

6. The 'border' properties:

The example rendering misses examples for 'dot-dash', 'dot-dot-dash' and
'wave'.

14.1. The @link rule:

  * the section is misplaced in this document, it has nothing to do with
    the box model in CSS

14.2. The link-behavior property

  * it should be "embed" instead of "expand" (as in XLink)
  * it should be "new" instead of "pop-up" (as in XLink)
  * it should be "replace" instead of "normal" (as you considered, as in
    Xlink)
  * the value "confirm" should be replaced by "download". The user
    already confirmed his action by activating the link, more
    confirmations aren't usable. If they are, it's up to the user agent
    to get a second confirmation from the user.

    Instead, we need a "download" behaivour. XLink unfortunaly doesn't
    include this behaivour but it's needed very often. For MIME there is
    the Content-Disposition header, but this is not applicable for WWW 
    resources, since different behaivours are desireable for different
    links, e.g. downloading images, XHTML documents, etc.

14.3. Confirming link traversal:

  * the example is invalid, the style element misses a type attribute
  * the title attribute is indeed abused here and the hyper reference
    doesn't point to something to download (as it states), it points at
    some location from where one may download something

  * if the WG insists of this property, the title attribute should read
    like "Download latest Mozilla build?", but as I said, the "confirm"
    behaivour is useless

  * who do the rel and rev attributes in XHTML interact with this @link
    rules?

14.5. The ":expanded" and ":collapsed" pseudo-classes:

  * Huh? More selectors outside the W3C selectors draft? I thought all
    selectors go in the W3C Selectors module? If so, move them there, if
    not, move e.g. the UI selectors to the UI draft from the Selectors
    module

14.7. The Back button:

  * Some interactive user agents don't have "buttons", Lynx for example
    or voice browsers with some kind of speech control, etc. Don't call
    it "button"; "history feature" or something like that would be more
    appropriate.

15. The float property:

  * the second example isn't well-formed. Even if this is no issue,
    since the example is HTML, it's bad style if you consider, that
    XHTML is meant to replace HTML; this goes for other sections, too.
    For example, please quote all attribute values

18. Collapsing margins:

  * the third example: the last closing tag should be indented to the
    same level of the start tag

Acknowledgements:

  * the last sentence is "See under", I'm sure there is something
    missing

References:

  * Xlink is now a recommendation (as of publication of this draft)
  * SVG is a proposed recommendation (as of publication of this draft)

I suggest to use XHTML syntax for the document and all examples in place
of HTML; I suggest to incorporate examples for different markup
languages like SVG or MathML.

I have more comments, hopefully I'll get some time to write them up...

regards,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann { mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de } http://www.bjoernsworld.de
am Badedeich 7 } Telefon: +49(0)4667/981028 { http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 16:23:05 UTC