- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 13:19:10 -0700
- To: Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com>
- Cc: Dirk Schulze <dschulze@adobe.com>, "www-style@w3.org" <www-style@w3.org>
On Fri, Sep 27, 2013 at 1:06 PM, Alan Stearns <stearns@adobe.com> wrote:
> The normative grammar-based definition is not readable when precise, and
> not precise when readable. I think there's a false sense of accuracy in
> the format for functional notation, as we seem to be willing to fudge
> whitespace rules everywhere.
What do you mean?
> And I'm not sure how we expect people to find
> their way to [1] to decipher the grammar scribblings.
Bikeshed links to that in propdef Value lines. Bikeshed doesn't
currently insert a "Values" boilerplate section, but you can do so
yourself for now.
> I'm not willing to add back in what was in the draft:
>
> rectangle([<length>|<percentage>][, [<length>|<percentage>]]{3,5})
>
> As there are too few people who have any idea what {3,5} means here,
It's standard regex-inspired syntax, familiar to anyone who has a comp
sci background.
For people that don't, that's what the prose is for. Like I said,
feel free to put in a clear *explanation* of the syntax in prose; in
fact, that's preferred.
> and I
> think it's unfortunate that I have to use the numbers 3 and 5 to mean "4
> to 6".
I've run into this before - we really need to allow you to specify the
repetition amounts after a #, so you could just write:
rectangle( [<length>|<percentage>]#{4,6} )
> But I could add back in something more readable, based on the
> examples I see in CSS3-Color:
>
> rectangle() = rectangle( <arg>, <arg>, <arg>, <arg> [, <arg>]? [, <arg>]? )
> <arg> = <length>|<percentage>
>
> Would that be satisfactory?
Yes, that would also be fine.
~TJ
Received on Friday, 27 September 2013 20:19:57 UTC