Procedural (non-technical) point about freezing the cat and hat combinators before they've even been defined (was Re: Shadow DOM: Hat and Cat -- if that's your real name.)

+www-archive, replies just to www-archive (since this non-technical)

Hi,

Tab wrote:

> Chrome *will* be shipping Shadow DOM publicly (in conjunction with
> Moz) in the *very near* future. Whatever API gets shipped will be
> frozen almost immediately. If you want to suggest name changes, as we
> brainstormed a bit at the f2f, do so RIGHT NOW or forever hold your
> peace.

In the CSS WG we've historically allowed implementations to ship
unprefixed properties when the spec containing those properties hits CR.
Selector combinators are a funny case—they can't be prefixed—so we
should be extra careful about shipping them prematurely.

But as far as I can tell, these combinators *aren't even specced*, much
less in a spec that's hit (or will soon hit) CR. This seems highly
irregular.

I assumed ^ and ^^ would be defined in Selectors 4. But they're not in
its latest WD:

                    http://www.w3.org/TR/selectors4/

Nor in its latest ED:

                  http://dev.w3.org/csswg/selectors4/

Nor are they in the latest Shadow DOM WD:

                    http://www.w3.org/TR/shadow-dom/

Nor in its ED:

         http://w3c.github.io/webcomponents/spec/shadow/#styles

No, wait, they're in there. In Chapter 6 "Styles" we find this:

> ISSUE 6
> Hats, ^, and Cats, ^^, selector combinators should be defined in this
> section.

I'm left with the conclusion that these combinators are entirely
undefined. I'm really surprised the Chrome team intends to ship these
enabled by default in production.


Ted

Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2014 02:22:42 UTC