Re: [css3-flexbox] Painting order

On 20/07/2012 17:27, fantasai wrote:
> On 07/20/2012 05:05 AM, Anton Prowse wrote:
>>
>> I do have a gripe about the following sentence in the ED:
>>
>> # Authors /must/ use ‘order’ only for visual, not logical, reordering
>> # of content; style sheets that use ‘order’ to perform logical
>> # reordering are non-conforming.
>>
>> The "must" and the threat of non-conformance are toothless tigers
>> since how can a UA determine whether the author has used
>> 'order' as an unwise alternative to logical reordering? My impression
>> is that this sentence is intended to be an authoring
>> recommendation. That's valuable, but it needs to be a note and it
>> needs to get rid of the RFC2119 keywords and the
>> non-conformance claim.
>
> Author conformance requirements don't need to be machine-checkable.
> It's handy when they are, but they don't have to be. See, for example,
> the author conformance criteria on the use of tables:
>
> http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html#tabular-data

Interesting, thanks.

Somehow that example (tables in HTML) makes sense, because the document 
being declared as non-conformant is the same as the document where the 
non-conformant behaviour occurs.  I find it odd to declare a stylesheet 
non-conformant based on a particular instance where it has been applied 
to a document, though.  (That said, I accept that stylesheets and 
rulesets can be embedded into a document in various ways, thereby tying 
the two things together.)

Ultimately, though, subjective things seem like undeserving candidates 
for a "must".

Cheers,
Anton Prowse
http://dev.moonhenge.net

Received on Friday, 20 July 2012 16:24:01 UTC