Re: [css3-fonts] FontLoader v2

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 9:00 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 5:53 PM, Glenn Adams <glenn@skynav.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 8:50 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >> Theoretical purity falls below author utility.  We shouldn't punish
> >> authors by forcing them to write ".fontface.style" just because we
> >> spec authors can't get our act together on the IDL side.
> >
> > Sorry, I don't buy it. You can't punish authors for not giving them
> > something they don't have.
>
> I don't understand.  We have two possibilities: we can make authors
> write "event.fontface.style.weight", or "event.weight".  The latter is
> shorter without being confusing, so it's intrinsically better for the
> author.  The *only* reason to avoid it is to avoid collisions with
> other attributes we'd like to hang on "event", but that's not a
> problem we need to worry about here.
>
> Thus, the obviously correct solution is to choose the latter option.
> Anything else is punishing authors by forcing them to write more code
> than they should have to, for no benefit to anyone but us spec
> authors.
>

What you appear to find obvious, I find irrational. Your suggestion has the
following negatives:

   - increases cognitive load on author, since there are two ways of
   accessing similar/identical information
   - increases likelihood of one of the two ways of accessing this
   information to become out of sync over time, leading to subtle differences
   in author's usage, increasing overall complexity, increasing likelihood of
   author errors
   - increases effort on UA implementors, both in coding and testing
   - increases UA code footprint unnecessarily
   - increases effort for spec authors, maintainers, spec test writers
   - creates unnecessary possibility of fork in definition of functionality

Need I continue? And what does one get from this? The ability to tell the
author that, for a functionality they don't yet have, they need type nine
fewer characters??? No thanks. I don't want to increase the already high
level of 'perl'-entropy present in these specs. Are you a doppelgänger of
Larry Wall? ;)