Re: [css3] Specificity mechanism issue

> Done in base 16, for example, you get 00A and 0A0 respectively.  These are
> quite different, and the latter is bigger.

The spec’s “in a number system with a large base” part indeed caused
the confusion by being easy to overlook, back in 2004, and obviously
today.

> I personally think that the "large base" thing is not worth the confusion it
> engenders and the specificity should just be an ordered 4-tuple of natural
> numbers, with the 4-tuples ordered in a dictionary ordering.

That would be helpful. Personally I always used to think and explain
specificity based on tuples (straight forward); yet if you observe how
concatenation is typically explained, the base part seems to be the
first part to drown pretty much everywhere (outside www-style@).

Thanks Boris, Tantek.

-- 
Jens O. Meiert
http://meiert.com/en/

Received on Wednesday, 31 March 2010 03:07:04 UTC