- From: Adam Kuehn <akuehn@nc.rr.com>
- Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2004 11:05:50 -0400
- To: www-style@w3.org
Daniël Pelsmaeker wrote: > > Just out of curiosity, why is there not hex notation for this, as >> Brian suggests? Most designers use hex notation for their colors >> (it's the shortest declaration available). Is it just too difficult >> to parse in hex form? Can some sort of delimiter not be required? > > (E.g. color: #fff-0.8; or color: #ffffff-0.8;) That would eliminate >> ambiguity issues, and a compliant 2.1 UA would just ignore the >> declaration, same as it would any rgba() notation. > >I can imagine that it wouldn't be compatible with current CSS parsers >when they expect only six hexadecimal digits after a '#'. E.g. a parser >might only look for a '#' followed by up to 6 hexadecimal digits, and then >look for the next ';' ending the rule, thus ignoring the alpha component. It might, but does it? If so, it is not compliant with the spec. Parsing is supposed to continue right up to the semi-colon, and only then should validity be checked. Parsing should not proceed until a valid value is found and then ignore what follows until a semi-colon is reached. That isn't forward-compatible, and my feeling was that most browser-vendors understand that. Indeed, a quick check on Mac shows that Safari and Gecko properly ignore a rule of this form. Of course, IE for Mac incorrectly applies the rule, so maybe Microsoft is playing fast and loose with the spec. I don't have a Windows box handy to check IE6. Anyone? Even if IE6 got it wrong, it is debatable whether or not that should be sufficient to drive the spec, in light of two correct and independent implementations. Please consider this my request to have a hex-alpha notation in CSS3. -Adam
Received on Tuesday, 7 September 2004 15:05:47 UTC