Re: [CSS21] Concern about anonymous table objects and whitespace

Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> 8) Change rule 8 to say that the child box should be suppressed.
> 
> There is no rule 8?  (At least, not in the draft I'm looking at, from
> the link in your original mail to this thread.)

Er, sorry.  I must have been reading 
http://www.w3.org/Style/Group/css2-src/cover.html when I wrote this (the 
group-internal editor's draft thing.

It's identical to what you see in this part, except that there is a rule 
  inserted between the current rules 4 and 5 to try to deal with the 
whitespace issue.  So rules 1-4 are the same, rule 5 is the whitespace 
thing, and the later rules are shifted down by one compared to the last 
public draft.

> So it seems that your proposed algorithm boils down to these rules
> (padded out for exactitude, necessary because purging some of the
> anonymous-box creations violates some assumptions about table
> validity):
....

> 3.  If the parent P of a 'table-column' box T is not a
> 'table-column-group' box, a box corresponding to a 'table-column-box'

'table-column-group' at the end there.

Other than that looks like what I was proposing, yes.

I spent some time talking to David Baron about this yesterday, and he 
pointed out that one problem with this approach is that it makes it easy 
to accidentally make things disappear, with no obvious reason (from the 
author's point of view) for it.  This could be especially problematic if 
there are multiple interacting stylesheets.

He also pointed out that there is existing spec text that requires the 
sort of lookahead that makes me unhappy, and in particular that blocks 
inside inlines require it.

So another course of action might be to keep this text as it is, fix the 
continuing ambiguity wrt whitespace handling, possibly adjust rowgroup 
and colgroup behavior, and see what things look like implementation-wise 
in a bit...  If the whitespace thing is somehow clearly defined, I can 
at least try giving implementation a shot and see whether I really run 
into serious issues.

-Boris

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 15:28:56 UTC