Re: [css3-colors] Comments on Last Call

Tantek Çelik:
> On 4/14/03 2:43 PM, "Christoph Päper" <christoph.paeper@tu-clausthal.de>
>
>> I've never cared that much about SVG (neither Macromedia Flash),
>
> But Christoph, surely you wouldn't deny that the web community as a whole
> cares very much about vector graphics, if the adoption of Macromedia Flash
> is any indication.

That was probably bad wording. I'm just not that much interested in any
[vector] graphic format to read its specification and thus am not qualified
to comment on it directly, but I take the freedom to comment on its
influences on CSS, which I'm interested in and care about. My interest in
CSS is maybe reason enough to look into SVG, just because of its possible
influences.
Btw.: When SVG 1.0 was in the process of being made (released 2001-09-04), I
was neither aware of it nor participating in w3.org mailing lists (first
post 2001-12-06).

> Nowhere does it say that only the CSS Working Group may introduce
> formatting related properties.

Do you mean to CSS or in general?

> ... (CSS, SVG, XSL), and those groups have spent considerable hours
> in cross-group discussions.  The results haven't been perfect, but
> neither have they been disastrous.

Not disastrous, but sometimes annoying in details.

> What would certainly help is for more folks like yourself who are in
> general interested in the "style and presentation space" to at least
> monitor www-svg:

That's probably true, even if it's just to help avoid unwanted side effects
on CSS.

> I think if you have concerns about SVG, you really ought to review
> the latest spec (SVG 1.2)

I promise I'll do as soon as I find the time. It's almost time to get up
again and I'm not even in bed yet.

>> I assume it was mainly done by graphic artists, who are used to
>> certain things (X11, 0..1 alpha value), which are dumb or unlogic
>> for historical reasons, and thus didn't even think of changing that.
>
> That's a little unfair I think -

Well, they're just human. So am I--at least that's what they told me.

> it would be like claiming CSS was done by typographers who are
> used to certain things (...)

To some extent that's even true. Not that it was all bad. OTOH real
typographers certainly (would) miss some stuff from CSS they think was
essential.

A few things, however, simply don't make sense for a non-professional,
especially without the historic background. I mean, many people just use X11
named colors and don't even realize that the names are random--to say it
nicely. It's just like that, ever has, ever will.

Without a little typography knowledge it's hard to understand, what the
differences between font-variant and text-transform are, but once you know,
it's logical. I'm not yet able to see the logic in introducing rgba(50%,
50%, 50%, 0.5) instead of rgba(50%, 50%, 50%, 50%), except for old habits in
the graphic design environment which made it somehow into SVG.

>> I've similar feelings about XSL.
>
> Since we're talking about styling, I presume you are referring XSL-FO.

I don't remember which flavor it was that those ugly long hyphenated values
came from, e.g. "white-space-treatment: ignore-if-surrounding-linefeed".

> If SVG had not introduced 'currentColor', then perhaps we could have
> introduced 'current-color' instead.  At this point, it is not worth making
> it different.  Indeed, even before SVG, CSS2 introduced named system
> colors which were all camel-cased as well (or at least, unhyphenated),
> thus if anything, SVG was only being consistent with the keyword value
> naming scheme from CSS2 (nevermind the XML/DOM concerns etc.).

All I was asking for was to write "CurrentColor" instead of "currentColor",
because the spec also writes "CaptionText" etc., not "captionText"--harmony.
A minor wish not worth all the lines I, you and some others have written
about it, but also an example of the XYZ->CSS issues I was fretting about
earlier.

Christoph

Received on Monday, 14 April 2003 23:55:59 UTC