Re: Unit omission with zero length

On Sat, Nov 17, 2007 at 07:18:31PM +0200, Henri Sivonen wrote:

> On Nov 17, 2007, at 19:07, Bert Bos wrote:
>
>> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>>> From http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/#lengths :
>>>   "After the '0' length, the unit identifier is optional."
>>> [Henri interprets this as most likely meaning only literally `0'
>>>  and not applying to `0.0' etc.]
>>
>> Please stop reading "carefully," you're not a computer :-)
>
> I'm a validator developer. :-)

I suggest that computer programmers are the most important people to
understand the spec correctly, because in effect the implementations
define the meaning of the spec: i.e. CSS developers are influenced more
by what implementations do than by how the CSS writer interpret the spec
(if they even read the spec).

Computer programmers are particularly likely to interpret the
single-quote marks as denoting literal text.

I suggest rewording to

  After a length of zero, ...

As Henri points out, misinterpretation of this sentence results in some
software discarding the declaration when other forms of zero are used.

pjrm.

Received on Tuesday, 4 December 2007 06:30:54 UTC