Re: [css-om][css3-conditional] spaces, newlines and rule serialization

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Florian Rivoal <florianr@opera.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 17:57:11 +0200, Glenn Adams <glenn@skynav.com> wrote:
>
>  my preference would be one line only, no indentation; and that whitespace
>> must be in a minimized form, i.e., a single SPACE; if we leave whitespace
>> less specific, then the serialization becomes ambiguous; i have notice
>> that
>> in various tests that read the value of cssText, a literal comparison is
>> made without further parsing, and such comparisons tend to be non-portable
>> given the current lack of specificity; for example, some browsers always
>> append a "; " to the end of a serialized declaration block, effectively
>> adding an empty declaration to the list; others do not; this type of
>> difference needs to be eliminated if possible;
>>
>
> Opera used to not append ";" at the end, and we recently run into
> compatibility issues due to that, so we just aligned with the majority (or
> is it everybody?) and started appending ";". So we'd be in favor of
> speccing it that way, because that's what existing content seems to expect.
>

Webkit appends "; ", not ";", so there is still a difference. IMO, the spec
should prohibit adding either "; " or ";", and the implementations should
be changed accordingly.


>
> Glenn's proposal does sound like an simple compromise that would be easy
> to spec and implement, and would give us good interop, so I am tempted to
> agree, but it is also different from what everybody is doing today (I
> didn't test IE), so it worries me from a backward compatibility point of
> view.
>

Unless *all* major browsers produce exactly the same behavior, my position
is that we can change to a more rational, standard behavior. Let's
determine if there is universal agreement on behavior yet before adopting a
position.