Re: [CSS21] Nested Counters and Scope

On Friday 2005-07-22 20:36 +0200, Allan Sandfeld Jensen wrote:
> Sorry to rant, but I have to ask:
> 
> Why have rules that a redundant and pointless?

Because behavior should be interoperable.

Experience has shown that unspecified behavior leads to pages depending
on the market leader's behavior.  This requires that other
implementations reverse engineer the market leader.  It's much easier if
they can just read the spec.

> It would make sense if counter-reset and counter-increment properties was 
> additive, but they cascade like all other properties, which means that the 
> only way to do two resets on the element is to declare them both at the same 
> time: {counter-reset: dummy 0 dummy 1}. Being able to do that is just 
> pointless. Having to waste time defining the behaviour of pointless 
> declarations is even more pointless.

Sure, there are alternatives for what the behavior should be.  It could
be that the declaration should be considered an error (and thus be
ignored).

It really doesn't matter much; it just needs to be specified and
interoperable.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
          Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, The Mozilla Foundation