- From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2006 19:42:34 +0200
- To: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
* Bert Bos wrote:
>I think it's a good idea for the Selectors spec to say explicitly that
>the namespace prefixes are case-insensitive, but it has no business
>saying anything about canonicalization, APIs or the scope of prefix
>declarations.
The Selectors specification just notes "The mechanism for declaring a
namespace prefix is left up to the language implementing Selectors".
XBL2 did so, but that did not result in an unambiguous definition of
when an element matches a selector. I think a complete answer to the
question
What do specifications that wish to use selectors and namespace
prefixes in selectors have to define in order to achieve an un-
ambiguous definition of when an element matches a selector that
contains one or more namespace prefixes?
is perfectly in scope of the Selectors specification. As it stands,
the answer provided in the draft is incomplete. This needs fixing.
I am less concerned about how this is done exactly. My proposal is
a processing model that other specifications can easily normatively
refernce. It may be ...
>Some other technology that uses Selectors can define these aspects any
>way it likes: case-preserving or not, normalizing or not, lexical or
>dynamic scope. It would be good if two similar APIs made similar
>choices, but the Selectors spec doesn't need to say what those choices
>should be.
... that parts of it do not "need" to be in the specification. What
we have now is a specification claiming that "given an element and a
selector, this specification defines whether that element matches the
selector" which is true only if you don't have namespace in the mix.
My proposal defines, given an element, a selector, and one of
* a hash with case-sensitive keys
* a hash with case-insensitive keys
* an algorithm to resolve prefixes
whether the element matches the selector. Specifications using the
Selectors specification then simply have to define the hash or the
algorithm to be used. I think that this is also in scope of the
specification. Keeping the specification as is would leave us with
[ mechanism for declaring a namespace prefix ]
|
magic
|
v
[ selector x element -> boolean ]
Do you have some other proposal for how to remove this magic bit?
(I note that some of these problems also apply to default namespace
declarations; the current draft does not even say that the mechanism
for declaring a default namespace is to be defined by other specs.)
--
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Thursday, 19 October 2006 17:49:29 UTC