Re: [css3-text] comments on text-transform

On Wed, Oct 05, 2011 at 05:45:29PM -0700, John Daggett wrote:
> 
> > > New wording, v2:
> > >
> > >   If and only if the content language of the element is known,
> > >   according to the rules of the document language such as those
> > >   for HTML, then language-specific rules must also be applied. 
> > >   These minimally include, but are not limited to, the rules in
> > >   Unicode's SpecialCasing.txt [ref].
> > 
> > I don't understand what "such as those for HTML" conveys that
> > "according to the rules of the document language" doesn't.  [...]
> 
> Since HTML is the primary document language for which CSS is used, it
> doesn't hurt to make it clear that HTML has rules that describe how
> language is inferred. Adding a link to the definition of "document
> language" is a fine idea.

I already tend to take the phrase "the rules of the document language" to
imply that every document does have such rules, but I can see how the
first part of the sentence might be read along the lines "if the document
language has rules".

If we just want to make it clearer that every document language is
supposed to have rules (even if "not known" is one of the possible
outcomes of those rules), then we could tweak the wording along the lines

  | ... the content language of the element (according to the rules
  | of the document language[hyperlinked]) is not known

I think that should suffice; but if we want to be more helpful for common
document languages, then we might add an informative note referring the
reader to the section entitled ‘The lang and xml:lang attributes’ in the
HTML specification, or the section entitled ‘Language Identification’ in
the XML (1.0 or 1.1) specification.

Sorry to be writing at length on a minor wording issue; it's just that
the wording in the v2 proposal is just strange enough that it makes me
stop to wonder what the intent of the unexpected wording is.


Going back to the issue of missing definitions generally, one way of
addressing that would be to add a sentence to the Terminology section
(1.3) saying "The terms document language ignore, replaced element, style
sheet and user agent (UA) have the same definitions as in [CSS21]",
where each of the terms in question is marked up with <dfn> and is a
hyperlink to the relevant fragment of CSS21/conform.html (namely
#doclanguage, #ignore, #replaced-element, #style-sheet and #user-agent).

pjrm.

Received on Thursday, 6 October 2011 03:38:34 UTC