Re: "inline" elements in CSS2 box model, and "inline-block" in CSS3

Tantek Celik wrote:
> 
> a. we publicly introduced 'inline-block' over two years ago
>    in the 16 Sep 1999 UI for CSS WD:
> 
>  http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-userint-19990916#display
> 
> b. we implemented display:inline-block in IE5/Mac and IE6/Windows.

Eek! I thought that w3c policy was that anything introduced in a WD was
recommended not to be implemented in a released product, because of the
risk that a later version of the specification would change the meaning
and break products that were already "in the field".

Introducing inline-block to a released product seems particularly
pointless when CSS already has a good mechanism for introducing
vendor-specific properties - it would have been easy to define
-ms-inline-block for the purpose of providing support until CSS3 was
final. (The migration policy from -ms-inline-block to inline-block when
the spec is final is easy to figure out, I'll leave it as an exercise
for the reader).

I believe that Mozilla implemented a pre-final version of the "opacity"
property under the name -moz-opacity for this very reason. I don't think
they were aware of anything specific that was going to change, but since
opacity has never been in a final specification, its spec shouldn't be
limited by released browsers.

(I'm sure that Mozilla is also guilty of this in some other areas, so
I'm not picking on any particular vendor here)

Am I wrong?

Stuart.

Received on Wednesday, 17 October 2001 19:25:33 UTC