- From: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 10:45:35 -0700
- To: www-style@w3.org
On 06/24/2013 02:16 PM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote: > 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? I'd like to point out that your proposed definition subsumes inheritance into the term "cascaded". But cascading and inheritance are separate processes. This is already poorly-understood by authors, and I don't think it's a good idea to make our specs *also* conflate the two. If "specified value" is confusing and we want a better term, ok, let's add a new term that is clearer. But imo, us "cascaded value" for this purpose is not clearer. (I'll note that the terms, as chosen, made more sense in CSS2.0. Right now, I agree, the value stages terminology is a bit of a mess.) ~fantasai
Received on Wednesday, 26 June 2013 17:46:03 UTC