Re: Marking style properties as "required" + groups of styles

fantasai wrote:

>
> David Woolley wrote:
>
>>> Hi there, I've got something for the CSS3 'ideas' pile.
>>
>>
>> Variations on this get proposed every two or three months.  The
>> new feature in yours is the !required, but that isn't really needed
>> if you have an all or nothing grouping, and isn't particularly useful
>> without that grouping.
>>
>> I don't know why it hasn't been accepted, although a possible reason is
>> that it is unrealistic to expect browser developers to make conservative
>> claims of compliance and fixing such claims made in error are likely
>> to get very low priorities in the change control systems of commercial
>> browser developers.  Liberal interpretation of specification compliance
>> is second nature to marketing departments.
>
>
> For the particular proposal here, that wouldn't be a problem: you can 
> define
> it such that if the browser will not parse and store the value in the 
> cascade,
> then it must ignore all other declarations in the same !required group.
> Accepting the value into the cascade implies that the UA understands 
> and can
> handle the value, even if support is not perfectly spec-compliant by 
> Hixie's
> standards. This level of compliance claim already exists; the proposal 
> merely
> hooks into it. And it does so in a way that's technically 
> implementable at
> parse time; several of the other proposals require changes in the 
> cascade.
>
> ~fantasai
>
I'm not sure I agree. If this does get implemented we will still run 
into problems, as some browsers will, intentionally or not, mis-report 
their own status. Combine this with a situtation similar to that of 
HTML's button element--where one popular browser has implemented a 
non-standard behavior, rendering the element nearly useless for its 
inteded purpose.

I agree that some sort of support-based statement binding would  be 
lovely, but I'm wondering if this might be more reliably implemented 
another way.

Ryan Cannon

Received on Wednesday, 12 January 2005 13:45:25 UTC