Re: [CSS21] Wider variety of (non-junk) examples requested

On Fri, 26 Aug 2005, Chris Lilley wrote:
>>
>> ...valid would require significant amounts of extraneous and confusing 
>> markup, and since converting all such examples into XML fragments would 
>> almost certainly (based on extensive past experiences trying to make 
>> such changes) introduce a large number of new unknown errors to the 
>> document,
> 
> wow, really? I'm not sure what you refer to.

In the past, when trying to make changes to the examples, we have almost 
always ended up breaking something. For example, forgetting to update 
longdesc files, alt text, captions, associated stylesheets, etc, etc, etc.

In the end every time we've tried to change an example for editorial 
reasons (rather than to fix actual real problems) we have caused more 
confusion, at the cost of hours of WG time.


>> <H2>hello</H2>
>
> <h2>hello</h2> would introduce what errors exactly?

Well, taking the example in 9.1.2 for instance, if that were changed from 
uppercase to lowercase it would require the following to change: the tag 
names in the following paragraph, the image, the longdesc, the tag names 
in the paragraph after the image, _and the tag names in paragraph after 
the following example_. Assuming I haven't missed anything. It is WAY too 
easy to start missing things like this.


>> would you be satisfied if HTML examples in CSS 2.1 were written such 
>> that they are extracts of valid documents?
> 
> Can you point to a definition of 'extract of (a) valid document'? I'm 
> not aware of one.

Extract is an English word whose meaning you are perfectly familiar with. 
An extract of a valid document is subpart, a section of, a passage, an 
excerpt of that valid document.


>> making it XML would run the risk of significant errors being introduced 
>> (e.g. forgetting to update the longdesc description of the image).
> 
> I find this unconvincing.

Ok. As we have had direct experience of this, it is not something that I 
feel we need to convince you about.


>>     <P>More text
>
>     <P>More text</P>

Apart from neophillic adherence to fashionable syntaxes, what does this 
achieve? It doesn't in any way clarify anything, and indeed actually adds 
a text node to the example (which in this case is quite important as it 
affects the reason for the rendering to be as it is).

Note that the inadvertent addition of a text node is another example of a 
potential way to introduce errors into the spec.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 26 August 2005 16:25:45 UTC