Re: Reuse qualified name syntax

----- Original Message -----
> On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Paul Duffin <pduffin@volantis.com>
> wrote:
> > Thanks for everyone's feedback and comments. I have decided not to
> > accept the challenge of convincing W3C of need for using CSS
> > Qualified Names everywhere. So, I will ask a different question,
> > probably should have asked this in the first place ;-); first some
> > background:
> >
> > We have our own CSS processor that takes a CSS like mechanism for
> > styling our markup. Our use case is quite different to most of you
> > as we do the majority of the CSS styling on the server, and optimize
> > for each device. As you can imagine that is a very interesting
> > challenge.
> >
> > I want to extend our CSS like language to make use of CSS Qualified
> > Names in lots more places, basically almost everywhere that an IDENT
> > could be used, e.g.:
> > * Pseudo class names
> > * Pseudo element names
> > * At-rule names
> > * Property names
> > * Keyword names
> > * Class names
> >
> > Before I do that I wanted to check to see whether you have any plans
> > for reusing the CSS Qualified Names syntax, i.e. <IDENT>|<IDENT> for
> > any other purpose that could conflict with what I am doing, as I
> > want to be as CSS like as possible. I was concerned that | may be
> > used along with () for more logical grouping of selectors but that
> > appears to be satisfied with the :any() pseudo class. It seems to me
> > that any use of | in that way would be confused with CSS Qualified
> > Names and so should be avoided, even if you never plan to extend use
> > of them in this way.
> 
> Yeah, | is already "taken" for Namespaces and can't ever be used as a
> combinator.
> 
> I'm not enough of a grammar nerd to understand whether there are any
> parts of the Core Grammar that would conflict with using | in the
> other locations you want. Of course, if this is a proprietary
> extension, it doesn't particularly matter what the Core Grammar says.
> Just do what you want.
> 

Hopefully I am (enough of a grammar nerd ;-)) as I have checked and cannot find any issues. Some of the places are invalid according to CSS 2.1 tokenization (e.g. property name must be <IDENT>) but then we don't exactly follow that and if it was parsed by another CSS parser its error handling should just ignore them and carry on. My main concern was future enhancements that may have been discussed or planned.

I realise that you can't say 100% that it won't clash. If some feature does and we need to add support for the clashing part then I am sure that I will be able to work something out.

Received on Monday, 20 September 2010 16:30:15 UTC