Re: Initial values for widows and orphans

On 12/12/2012 04:05 PM, Dean Jackson wrote:
>
> Some more thoughts on using UA stylesheet:
>
> - I'm not sure why having the UA stylesheet force a value that
> disagrees with the specification is any better than having the
> implementation do it. As far as the developers are concerned,
> both are non-standard.

Fair enough. However, it does mean that non-browser implementations
also have to change their defaults to be CSS-compliant, whereas if
the concern is Web-compatibility, then setting a different value on
the HTML element is sufficient to ensure that.

> - UA stylesheets are limited to things that can be selected
> by CSS. This is purely theoretical, but imagine I need to implement
> a different "auto" behaviour on something that I can't write
> a selector for.
>
> I think I may have said this on Twitter (the greatest place for
> technical arguments), when we change existing content we get
> complaints from people. It doesn't matter if we think we've
> improved their content, as should be the case for these properties.
>
> The good news is that with 'auto', nothing gets worse. And anyone
> who has specified 'widows' or 'orphans' gets exactly what they
> asked for.

Your two arguments here are inconsistent. First you're arguing that
'auto' allows you to do things smarter than 'do nothing'. Then you're
arguing that the default should always be 'do nothing'. If we take
the latter argument, then we should just set them to '1'; no need
to introduce 'auto'.

> - There is the potential to conflict with author styles, because
> my UA stylesheet might be more specific (see above about wanting
> different behaviours).

There is no such thing in the rule I wrote. It sets the default on
HTML and lets it inherit through. In no case would an author style
be overridden.

~fantasai

Received on Thursday, 13 December 2012 00:16:45 UTC