Re: [css-cascade] all shorthand and UA defaults

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 9:36 AM, L. David Baron <dbaron@dbaron.org> wrote:
> On Monday 2013-07-22 15:51 -0700, fantasai wrote:
>> Ok, so on the telecon we discussed the requirements of the 'all'
>> shorthand, and how it relies on being able to properly reset
>> both inherited and non-inherited properties.
>>   http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2013Jul/0478.html
>> And then the related problem of the UA style sheet maybe having
>> rules that really ought to not be overridden.
>>
>> Tab and I went through the Gecko UA style sheet
>>   http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/layout/style/html.css
>> and it's fairly obvious from that that the 'all' shorthand
>> really should not be messing with the 'unicode-bidi' and
>> 'direction' properties.
>>
>> So we propose that the following properties be excluded from
>> 'all', because they are really controlling the content rather
>> than the style (and generally shouldn't be set by authors):
>>   direction
>>   unicode-bidi
>
> I'm really uncomfortable with adding special-purpose logic like this
> into what was intended as a general mechanism.  I suppose there's
> perhaps a decent argument for the change, but I'm certainly not
> happy about it.

Well, that's what we get when we put things into CSS that really
shouldn't have been there in the first place.  If people would have
pushed back harder to do xml:dir back in the day, we never would have
had to add 'direction' or 'unicode-bidi', and wouldn't be in this
situation today.  Shrug.

Anyway, resolution was to stick with 'all' not including those two
properties, but reject the suggested additional entries covered by
lang=''.

~TJ

Received on Wednesday, 24 July 2013 21:43:24 UTC