Re: [css3-syntax] Module update?

On Monday 14 February 2005 16:47, Christian Roth wrote:
> When can developers working on demo implementations of CSS3 (which
> require parsing a CSS stylesheet in the first place) expect an update
> to the CSS3 Syntax module?
>
> It seems to be in idle state since August 2003, i.e. for well over a
> year now. It poses many explicit questions (already there in red
> print in the document itself), some that have been posted on this
> mailing list in the past, as well as inconsistencies with CSS21 CR,
> and I'm just wondering whether there is any more detailed update on
> the schedule of this module than just "going REC in 2005".

Yes, the Syntax module is in a bad state. It hasn't been updated to 
reflect the corrections to CSS 2.1 and it is also a mixed bag of things 
that don't belong together. That we haven't published an update is 
mostly because of a lack of resources. Most of the energy has gone into 
fixing every last issue with CSS 2.1. Hopefully that will soon be 
finished.

But the Syntax module hasn't been completely without attention. The 
@namespace syntax will hopefully soon be published as a separate draft, 
thanks to help from SVG. The @media definition has already been 
published in the Media Queries specification. And we plan to separate 
the generic, forward-compatible grammar and the CSS3 grammar into 
separate modules (just as they are separate chapters in CSS 2.1). That 
should leave the Syntax module with just the generic grammar, 
tokenization rules, and character encoding, which, in theory, should be 
unchanged from CSS 2.1 and thus pretty easily written up and 
published...

... although we _do_ have a plan to add rules for error handling, so 
that UA's also handle files interoperably that claim to be CSS, but 
aren't (such as files with unbalanced curly braces or quote marks).



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos                               W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 16 February 2005 19:18:36 UTC