- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 14:38:16 -0800
- To: Peter Moulder <peter.moulder@monash.edu>, www-style list <www-style@w3.org>
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 5:21 AM, Peter Moulder <peter.moulder@monash.edu> wrote: > If we're allowing for implementations to use a 16-bit int to represent a bound, > then how would a bound of 'infinite' be represented? I suggest we allow > implementations the option of using 16-bit int values -2^15 and 2^15-1 for > this purpose, and thus suggest narrowing the required supported range to > [-2^15 + 1, 2^15 - 2]. Given that impl limits clamp your range anyway, you just implement 'infinite' as the largest/smallest number you support anyway. There's no need to record it as a special value. > That said, I vaguely recall that 2^15 had some other significance, perhaps > being the range of counter values that implementations had to support in CSS > 2.1 or something. Not really. We just needed to come up with some bound, and I already knew that implementations don't quite use a full 32 bits for it, so we went with the lower bound. > Apart from that, there are also a few nits in this paragraph; nothing > important, but most of them look easy enough to fix: > > - Literally speaking, 'infinite' is "a bound greater than the > implementation's supported bounds", but we presumably don't want it to be > "treated as specifying the implementation's maximum supported bound." > I suggest inserting the word ‘integer’. I don't understand the problem (that is, in fact, exactly what it means), nor what your solution is. > - "If a range ... then it must be treated as specifying the implementation's > maximum supported bound" suggests that it's the range that should be so > treated, rather than just the bound. Not a big problem, but it's easy to > fix: I suggest removing the "range" part of that sentence, i.e. just "If a > bound is specified...". Done. > - It would be nice to find a wording that more obviously conveys magnitude, > at least for the "maximum supported bound" part (which fairly strongly > suggests just the upper bound, on first reading), and to a lesser extent > also the earlier "lower bound of at least" part. That earlier one is > actually the easier to fix, e.g. "at least as negative as". Maybe the > other could be something like "is outside of the supported bounds, then it > must be treated as the closest bound that the implementation does support". Done. ~TJ
Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 22:39:04 UTC