Re: block-based parsing?

Orion Adrian wrote:
> On 9/13/05, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux <dom@w3.org> wrote:
>> [...]
>>Namely, such a rule would require a parser to skip the entire block
>>contained into the @mustUnderstand scope if there is at least one rule
>>it can't parse or containing a property it doesn't know.
>>
>>This would make it much easier to create style sheets that incorporate
>>properties or syntax elements defined in later versions of CSS. It
>>wouldn't solve all the problems, but would certainly help in many cases.
> 
> It's been suggested many times; it's been rejected many times.
> 
> To sum up the reasoning:
> 
> Browsers can't be trusted to accurately say what features they do and
> don't support. So they may say they support a feature and go ahead
> with the properties in the block, but it won't in reality support it
> and you'll end up with a mess.

I agree with Philip Taylor that dropping this feature because UAs 
might/would lie about their support for features is indeed a weak 
reason. I agree with this reasoning against @version because a 
single CSS version is such a huge target but I don't understand what 
an UA would gain if they cheated while interpreting @required-rules 
block.

I agree that some authors could wrap their whole author style sheet 
inside @require-all { ... /* whole style sheet here */ ... } but 
they can already add "* html " prefix to all their selectors if they 
want to prevent everybody but MSIE users from using their style 
sheet. CSS already allows settings font color and text background 
separately and I consider that much bigger issue than wondering if 
authors hide most of their style sheet because of ignorance.

Old discussions about this include threads starting with:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Apr/0035.html
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2005Apr/0026.html

-- 
Mikko

Received on Tuesday, 13 September 2005 14:45:21 UTC