[css-cascade] Naming "value of a declaration", renaming "specified value"

The term "specified value" has always been confusing, because it does
*not* refer to the value the author specified.  Instead, it's always
referred to the value that starts the standard value-computation
chain, at the point where a given element has a value for every
property.

Ironically, we don't actually *have* a term for the value the author
actually specified in the stylesheet, or the close-enough concept of
what CSSStyleDeclaration returns.

Private conversation with dbaron (in #css) led to the following suggestions:

1. Use "declared value" for the value of a declaration; that is, what
is returned when you query CSSStyleDeclaration.  This is not
associated with any particular element, and may not have a value for
every property.

2. Drop the term "specified value", and slightly modify Cascade so
that "cascaded value" fills the role.  This just requires us to
slightly change the verbiage around how we handle the global keywords;
currently, the "cascaded value" may be empty or resolve to one of the
global keywords.  We'd change it so that as part of the computation of
the cascaded value, we guarantee that we fill in a value, and resolve
away the global keywords.  (Our current use of "cascaded value" in the
spec is unobservable from the outside, and we can just lean on the
term "result of the cascade" to represent the value that might be
empty or might be a global keyword.)

Thoughts?

~TJ

Received on Monday, 24 June 2013 21:17:27 UTC