Re: [css-display] Naming a "display:none"-ness switch.

On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 2:18 PM, Henrik Andersson <henke@henke37.cjb.net> wrote:
> Tab Atkins Jr. skriver:
>> Recent discussion between me, fantasai, and some internal people over
>> the 'display-box' property
>> <http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-display-3/#the-display-box> have led us
>> to conclude that it needs to be a completely separate property, not a
>> longhand of 'display'.  (Reasoning below.)  However, now we need a
>> name.  We've come up with "box", "show", and "box-tree".  Better
>> suggestions?
>>
>> Rationale:
>> Currently the Display module makes "none"-ness a sub-property of
>> 'display'.  This does what we want (gives us an independent switch for
>> whether or not the box is shown, separate from box type), but this has
>> some problems:
>>
>> * To set the box type safely, you need to always set two properties,
>> 'display-inside' and 'display-outside', so as to avoid accidentally
>> clobbering the "none"-ness value.
>> * Currently, authors use 'display' to set the box type, which means
>> that UA-stylesheet use of the "none"-ness value will get clobbered
>> unless everyone rewrites their pages (which won't happen).
>
> Another motivation is that it is simpler for scripting to toggle a
> separate property than to remember what the old value was of the property.

I didn't list that because that's a benefit of the current approach in
the Display spec, where 'display-box' is a sub-property of 'display'.
This email was about *problems* with 'display-box', so listing things
that 'display-box' still did right didn't seem relevant. ^_^

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 5 March 2013 22:24:19 UTC