Backwards and Forwards Compatability

After thinking about this, I've determined that it's forwards
compatibility is nice, but difficult to achieve if you're not very
careful.

So I thought about the guidelines for this and I present them here.

1) No new property should require non-normal values of old properties
to work (e.g. display: absolute and margin).

2) No new property should be used to hide or modify content in such a
way that it's non-existence should fundamentally change the meaning of
the styled document.

3) No properties should have complex interactions with other
properties in a set which would complicate implementation in such a
way deaming it unlikely the spec will be interoperable (e.g. display:
table) *

Well that's what I've come up with so far. I think 1 is critical, 2 is
important and 3 would be nice to have.

* This is probably highly arguable, but I thought hey, these are
guidelines, not rules.

-- 

Orion Adrian

Received on Wednesday, 13 July 2005 02:38:35 UTC