CSS2.1: Markers are needed!

I'm troubled with the removal of markers from the CSS2.1 spec, and take issue with the stated reason of allowing user agents to become compliant. The removal of this and other features does not, in fact, accomplish this, because browsers are not following the CSS2 spec in other more significant ways. All it serves to do is remove features that are, or would be, useful to Web authors and designers at large. With this reasoning, shouldn't position:fixed and overflow:auto be removed from CSS2.1, since IE/Win doesn't support the former and Opera doesn't support the latter?

[12] Markers. The one that most troubles me is the elimination of markers. Since list-style provides no way to size or style bullets separately from the list content, and doesn't provide any means of specifying the use of characters as bullets, the removal of markers takes away significant functionality.

Also, it would be incorrect to say that no browser supports this, since Netscape 6.x and higher (including Netscape 7.0 and Mozilla), (though they display the bullet in addition to the marker when used with OL or UL lists--an easy bug to fix, and it's not present when using markers on elements that don't generate markers on their own). Try this test page as an example:
http://www.cadenceweb.com:8080/newsletter/sheerin/test/

[12.2] Counters. I'm less concerned about counters being removed, since I'm not aware of any working implementations. Also, I'm not sure that the description in CSS2 is written clearly enough for either implementors or authors. For instance, I would argue that one needs to be able to reference the counter value in other elements, so that one could number paragraphs, for instance, and cross-reference them by referencing the ID value of an element, and repeating its counter value (e.g. Paragraph {counter(ContractExemption)} shall be interpreted...). It's not clear to me if such cross-referencing is possible in CSS2, and the lack of that feature combined with the lack of implementations makes it acceptable (to me, at least) to defer until CSS3, when this and other issues can be resolved.

Received on Monday, 5 August 2002 18:32:17 UTC