Re: Useragent Rules in CSS

Tantek Çelik wrote:
>>>You say this as if the working group changes things on a whim.
>>
>>No, I just say this as a fact.
> 
> I must say that the facts DO NOT support any sort of assertion that
> things were changed "on a whim".

Er... I said that changes have been made. Ian said that I was saying 
this as if they were made on a whim.  I replied that on the contrary I 
was merely stating a fact: "Changes have been made."  I did not imply 
anything about the quality of the changes (which I feel has been high 
overall), and I certainly did not imply they were made on a whim, either 
in my first mail or in my response to Ian.

It seemed to me that the "this" in my response pretty clearly referred 
to the original statement under discussion and not to Ian's "whim" 
statement....

>>This includes some IE/Windows
>>"bugs", as Tantek pointed out,
> 
> Please provide a reference to this.

Your mention of the change from CSS1 to CSS2 as to whether multiple 
class selectors were allowed in a selector.

> Another interpretation is, do UA authors make builds available (i.e. ship
> software) where they:
>   1. parse a property
>   2. have known bugs about that property in their bug database

The answer would be yes, indeed.

> I would assert that any new UAs shipping today are shipping knowingly with
> bugs in the properties they claim to support.

Again, most likely yes.

>>1) the status of '_' in identifiers (no scrapping here, really, it was
>>  not a huge change).
> 
> Not a mutation but an addition, just like the addition of a new value
> keyword to a property.

The point is, just like adding a new value keyword it makes a UA 
non-compliant.

>>2) the parsing of background-position (this _did_ have to be pretty much
>>  scrapped, since the hard part was the error-checking logic).
> 
> Same thing here.  Additional combinations were allowed.  This did not
> invalidate old combinations.

A UA was non-compliant before if it did not reject the new combinations. 
  Now it is non-compliant if it does not accept them.  No?  Again, not a 
value judgement on the change, just a factual statement.

>>3) the cascade level at which presentational hints live in XML (making
>>  all sorts of UAs non-compliant at a go).
> 
> This was an inconsistent mess and needed to be fixed.

I wasn't saying it was a happy situation before.  I was merely providing 
examples as requested by Ian.

> I would be curious to hear of any more changes you think were unwarranted or
> whimsical.

Again, I didn't say any changes were unwarranted.  I merely pointed out 
the fact that the CSS spec has been a moving target for years now, even 
if it's been moving for very good reasons.

-Boris

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2004 13:29:11 UTC