Re: [css3-*] [css3-box] Box Tree terminology for CSS3 specs

On 23/11/2011 22:29, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 12:59 PM, Anton Prowse<prowse@moonhenge.net>  wrote:
>> On 23/11/2011 00:09, L. David Baron wrote:
>>>
>>> On Tuesday 2011-11-22 12:31 -0800, fantasai wrote:
>>>>
>>>> So that we can disentangle boxes from elements and logical boxes from box
>>>> pieces in our CSS3 specs, I'm proposing the following terminology
>>>> (borrowing
>>>> from Rossen's work on css3-break):
>>
>> I'm happy with the idea of disentangling these concepts (of course), but I
>> share David's concerns about pseudo-elements.
>
> I don't really share these concerns.  ::before, ::after, ::marker, and
> many other pseudo-elements we have thought about adding are basically
> normal boxes.  It's only ::first-line, and to a somewhat lesser extent
> ::first-letter, that cause problems.  These should be called out
> specially, so that by default all the other well-behaved
> pseudo-elements work normally without us having to go to extra effort
> and verbosity.

I agree that the problem is limited to a tiny handful of special cases, 
but the trouble is that there is a desire not to drop ::first-line, 
::first-letter and ::selection (although I was an advocate of dropping 
them from CSS21); and yet calling them out (by which I presume you mean 
excluding them from the definitions) doesn't avoid the need to spec them 
properly in some parallel way across the whole CSS landscape.  That 
doesn't sound much fun, and has the potential to be *really* messy if 
all the definitions are created without even bearing these awkward 
beasts in the back of one's mind.  I wouldn't dismiss the possibility 
out of hand though.

Cheers,
Anton

Received on Wednesday, 23 November 2011 21:41:04 UTC