- From: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 2 May 2006 17:08:01 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org
Encouraged by the discussion on embedded fonts & image replacement, the
CSS WG asks for help on another issue:
Last year's draft of Backgrounds and Borders[1] contains an enhanced
syntax for the 'background' property that also allows the size of the
background image(s) to be specified.
The problem is how to distinguish the size from the position, because
both can be expressed as lengths. In the draft, the size is therefore
enclosed in parentheses:
... 1em 1em (20% 50%)...
means that the image is positioned at 1em from the left and 1em from the
top and it has a width of 20% and a height of 50%.
That works, but parentheses aren't the most elegant kind of punctuation.
They may be confused with expressions and once we have real
expressions, such as expr(20% + 1em), it would look strange to have to
write '(expr(20% + 1em))'.
So, the CSS WG wants some other syntax. The possibilities are endless,
in theory. In practice, it requires some creativity...
Who can come up with a syntax for the 'background' shorthand that is
unambiguous (of course!), easy to read and easy to remember?
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-css3-background-20050216/
For the CSS WG,
Bert
--
Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
http://www.w3.org/people/bos W3C/ERCIM
bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 92 38 76 92 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2006 15:08:06 UTC