Re: We are where we are.... but how did we get here?

On Wednesday 2005-06-29 23:43 +0300, Emrah BASKAYA wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Jun 2005 23:28:10 +0300, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> >There are much simpler solutions for the problem of column styling than
> >a second pass of selector matching.  For example, we could have column
> >selectors that select based on the table semantics of the underlying
> >content (rather than how that content happens to be displayed).

> Well the article say is it all, it is impossible, with the current CSS  

Ah, I realize you were referring to the article
http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1070385285&count=1 (which was cited in the
great-grandparent message in the thread).

> methods, as somehow, getComputedStyle manages to be in the heart of the  
> problem, because CSS2.1 tells us so. So it must not be possible for a  
> browser to tell how it colored a cell, because if it does, this is against  
> CSS2.1 rules. It shouldn't know how it colored an element to conform 2.1 .  
> Which is much better than actually being able to color the 'thing'.

The problem described in the article is that selectors can't depend on
computed values of properties since selector matching happens before
value computation.  However, that doesn't mean that there aren't
selectors that are almost equivalent (in this case, selectors that
select based on the table semantics of the markup rather than the
computed table 'display' values) that don't have this problem.

-David

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