Re: 'initial' | 'inherit' inconsistency

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 10:54, Sylvain Galineau <sylvaing@microsoft.com> wrote:
>> From: www-style-request@w3.org [mailto:www-style-request@w3.org] On
>> Behalf Of Eric A. Meyer
>> Sent: Friday, October 29, 2010 9:27 AM
>> To: www-style@w3.org
>> Subject: Re: 'initial' | 'inherit' inconsistency
>
>> And I already knew about those keywords and their
>> asserted universality.  How will someone who has not heard of them be
>> reminded?  Again, very, very few people read an entire module from
>> front to back.  They look up the properties.

Agreed.


> While 'inherit' is fairly well-known and understood for people familiar
> with CSS today, I also wonder how many authors even know about 'initial'.

I'm with the "out of sight out of mind" school of thought on this.

The more you force authors/implementors to jump through link-hoops to
fully understand something, the less they will understand it.

Agreed with explicitly putting 'inherit' inline on *every* property's
value grammar.



However, I strongly object to 'initial' being a burden on any draft
except CSS3 Values and Units.

CSS3 Values and Units - what defines 'initial' - is *only* a working draft.

Public version is *over* four years old: 19 September 2006

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-values/


So as far as I'm concerned, 'initial' is an ignored experiment, and
not worth teaching to web authors.


Those that think 'initial' should be taken seriously (doesn't have to
be the editors), please step up and:

1) get an updated CSS3 Values and Units *public* working draft
published (not just editor's draft)
2) get CSS3 Values and Units to Last Call Working Draft

Then we can talk about taking 'initial' seriously in other specs.

Until then, I'm ignoring 'initial' (due to lack of action behind words
from this group) and recommending against anyone using it.

Tantek

-- 
http://tantek.com/ - I made an HTML5 tutorial! http://tantek.com/html5

Received on Friday, 29 October 2010 18:40:25 UTC