[css3-lists] of lists and castles

My guess is that this has been touched on before but I think the
current CSS3 Lists spec is focusing on the wrong aspect of the what is
needed to improve lists in CSS.  In the context of ordered lists in
CSS, I don't think we need to push CSS to support all possible
numbering systems.  I've worked on internationalized number formatting
in applications before and the possible variations are as numerous as
the day is long. This makes it very hard to choose the "right" set of
common styles to support universally.  You can see the variety just by
comparing some of the styles supported in the MS Office specs that
Koji referenced [1] to the ones listed currently in the spec (and in
Mozilla's implementation [2]).  Supporting the union of the two could
easily double the size of the spec.

I think it would be better to focus on making the extension mechanism
(i.e. @counter-style) as simple as possible to allow *simple* extended
list styles and not require user agents to support a long list of
default formats that may or may not be what users in a given locale
prefer in a given context.  Specifically, I think section 4.3
("Complex counter styles") should be dropped completely and the list
of required @counter-style rules reduced significantly or eliminated.

I think describing number formatting in general (i.e. beyond the use
in simple lists) is a worthy task but not something that really
belongs in a CSS rec.  I think a W3C Note or a Unicode Technical Note
would be a better place for this work.  I don't see any real use for
numbers that run into the trillions in the context of lists.

Regards,

John Daggett

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2011Apr/0619.html
[2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/list-style-type

Received on Monday, 25 April 2011 06:28:48 UTC