- From: Anton Prowse <prowse@moonhenge.net>
- Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2012 08:39:34 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org
- CC: Peter Moulder <peter.moulder@monash.edu>
On 16/07/2012 07:00, Peter Moulder wrote: > On Sun, Jul 15, 2012, Anton Prowse wrote in one thread: > >> [Despite the fact that Appendix E is written in terms of the stacking >> context and its descendants being elements not boxes, the proposal >> relies on the term "block container" which is currently a box term >> that's undefined for elements. It would be great if we could just >> define "block container element" sensibly.] > > and in another thread: > >> Recently I hit upon yet another place in the spec where the context >> is elements and where the spec needs to be updated to refer to block >> containers: Appendix E. [1] The new text will be incongruous if we >> don't define "block container element". > > The above two both contain something of an error in that although Appendix E > uses the word "element", it's explicit that it uses the word in a special sense > (see E.1, where it's defined to mean something quite a lot like "box"; and the > phrase "For each box that is a child of that element" also suggests a very > box-like understanding of what Appendix E means by "element"). > > Thus, it's wrong or at least misleading to describe appendix E > as being about "elements and not boxes". D'oh! Thanks for pointing that out. I was aware of that in the past, but I certainly had forgotten that when working on Appendix E the other day. > Although there remain some issues as to exactly what Appendix E means by an > "element" and its descendants, I think the above shows that the existing use of > the word "element" is causing problems: in a reference document such as the CSS > 2.1 spec, people expect to be able to understand the meaning of a paragraph (or > a phrase such as "If the element is a block container", in the current case) > without reading the whole chapter to see that the word "element" has a > different meaning in this appendix to the rest of the spec. Yep, that would be nice ;-) > I suggest that it should at least use a different word or phrase > ("render-element" ?), and wouldn't be surprised if simply "box" ended up being > the right word. I wouldn't be surprised either! Cheers, Anton
Received on Monday, 16 July 2012 06:40:08 UTC