Re: WD-CSS21-20020802 section 8, "Box model", substantive comments

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Etan Wexler wrote:
>
> Humiliation may be a good incentive (I'm not sure that it is)

I have good reason to believe that humiliation works better than almost
any other incentive to doing the right thing.


> It is the normative text which defines compliance. Neither prevailing
> wisdom, nor consensus among list members, nor collective consciousness
> has any bearing in the definition of compliance once published.

Actually all these things can still affect the spec, as witnessed by their
effect on the CSS2 errata.


> I think that what is bothering me is not so much the prospect of
> misimplementations; I've seen plenty during my short love affair with
> CSS, and some more won't really hurt me. No, what is bothering me is the
> prospect that a vendor could release a decrepit implementation, call it
> compliant, and be correct.

So what. They'd be correct but, as I said, they'd be the laughing stock of
the CSS community. No author would accept "oh well it is technicaly
correct even though the 'border' property is useless". Frankly, UA authors
are much more likely to say they are compliant based on the results on an
over-simple test suite (which is utterly inadequate for establishing
overall compliance) than some minor text in the CSS spec.

"Provides full support for Cascading Style Sheets, Level 1 (CSS1)"
  -- http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/evaluation/features/default.asp


> On the bright side, I believe that the fix is easy to specify. Please
> consider the following passage, written as HTML, for inclusion. [...]

This fix requires that XForms implementations not render XForms controls
with native UI, and yet it allows <object> elements to be given non-CSS
borders. It fails to mention XFrames, XLink and SVG yet adds even more
language-specific text to a supposedly language-agnostic spec. And it is
huge, without any particular improvement.

What about an implementation of CSS that applies it to XUL, a proprietary
XML-based user interface language styled with CSS? Does your text make
such an implementation non-compliant for using native borders on its UI
controls?

I think a much better solution would be to leave as is in 2.1, and change
the restriction in CSS3 to be "UAs must render borders as specified unless
the 'appearance' property has a non-'none' value.".

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 28 February 2003 11:24:54 UTC