Re: Text selector [was Re: breaking overflow]

On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Brad Kemper <brad.kemper@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 6, 2010, at 4:01 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>>> I don't think it is any more confusing than most other CSS specs, where a clear understanding of the spec helps one understand what happens with edge cases.
>>
>> Very few people have a clear understanding of the spec, and the
>> details of how implied elements nest and break each other is
>> non-trivial to understand.
>
> Right. I didn't mean the entire CSS spec as a whole. I meant, pick almost any module, and there will be some things that are less intuitive, that give rise to blog entries, tutorials, etc.
>
> I think that what I am imagining is pretty intuitive (inside my head anyway). If it could be explained well and precisely, and the finer details worked out, I think it would be mostly intuitive, and there would just be some uncommon edge cases that might require explaining. Such as the white-space stuff that Robert O' brought up. I want the edge cases to be as intuitive as possible, but even more I want the more general cases to be intuitive and easy to use. I don't think we are that far off from these goals.

Right, so one of the major problems is the misnested boxes that can
occur.  We want to allow nested ::text matches, but misnested matches
are a problem.  Dealing with them naively results in the unintuitive
and undesirable behavior I pointed out before.  How does my suggestion
for most-powerful-matched-first sound for fixing this, and making
previously matched ::text pseudos count as element boundaries just
like a real element when matching later/less powerful ::text pseudos?

~TJ

Received on Thursday, 7 January 2010 05:50:34 UTC