Re: Multiple Text Decoration Values

Andrew Fedoniouk / 2004-07-05 08:36:

> 1) Blinking and other sorts of animation - dynamic effects-
> are easy implementable using client-side scripting.
> So why duplicate this in CSS with such rudimental functionality?

Oh, please. If some people really want blinking text, then keep the 
functionality. With CSS we can hopefully design it so that user can 
tell his user agent to display "blink" as normal text. If blinking 
is done with scripting, then the user agent cannot really detect 
that from any other script and I end up getting blinking text, which 
I don't like. Just fix the text-decoration / cascade issue.

> 2) Blinking makes sense only for media=screen and this is another reason why
> it should be deprecated.

This reasoning makes absolutely no sense. Do you really think that 
::hover should be deprecated too? It does work with media=screen 
only, too!

> 3) I can see some ergonomical sense (it does exist though) if it would be a
> function with e.g. how-many-times-to-blink parameter. Example I can recall
> easily: blinking margin borders in the Inspector tool (Mozilla). But this is
> not a text and it has limited number of blinks.

A setting like this should be in user agent end. See numerous .GIF 
examples; GIF format allows author to specify how many times the 
animation loop is displayed. About 99.999% of all animated GIFs loop 
to the end of the world. If author gets to say how many times a 
piece of text blinks, it will probably blink forever.

> 4) Animation is usefull in general. Examples: transitional effects in MAC
> and Windows OSes.
> But 'text-decoration: blink' is so primitive that it cannot be considered
> even as a sort of solution.

CSS isn't powerful enough language to express transitional effects 
without a huge array of properties and that's something WG doesn't 
want AFAIK. If you want animation, please, use SVG. (And if you 
don't want to use it because the end user software doesn't support 
it, do you really think that any new CSS feature would get supported 
any faster?)

I don't mind if CSS has numerous possible values for each property 
but I hope CSS doesn't end up having hundreds and hundreds of 
different properties to tweak and all those tweaks interact with 
each other.

-- 
Mikko

Received on Monday, 5 July 2004 05:17:47 UTC