Re: ::Parts of cats and hats everywhere, slashed by shadow

On Friday 2014-02-07 12:16 -0800, Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
> On Feb 7, 2014, at 9:43 AM, Daniel Buchner <daniel@mozilla.com> wrote:
> > Sure it's a tad long - but you're a champ, you'll deal.
> > 
> > Yesterday a group of folks from this thread convened for a face-to-face meeting. I'd like to summarize the discussion, review our options, and present why I believe the proposal we zeroed in on during our meeting is the correct one:
> 
> Is the set of individuals this is addressed to the set of people who met? I am not sure how they are "from this thread" as most of them have not posted about the recent shadow dom styling threads (unless by "this thread" you mean the one started by this email).

The context of the discussion was that the Mozilla web development
folks who would like to see Web components happen (Daniel) and a
bunch of folks from Google (both developing and using Web
components) wanted to find out the position of Mozilla's Gecko team
on the current debate over Web components selectors.  At the time,
William Chen (who is working on implementing Web components) and I
(involved in the CSS WG) were around; the three of us (Daniel,
William, and I) were the only Mozilla participants in this
discussion.

My perspective was that the debate seemed to break down into two
totally different issues:

  (1) Selector syntax.  I pointed out that many people were
  uncomfortable using one of the three-and-a-half remaining ASCII
  characters in selector syntax (^, $, /, and ` which only counts as
  half in my book) for this, because of the limited supply, because
  of searchability of language details, and because of the sense
  that operators should be reserved for fundamental pieces that
  everybody using the language needs to be familiar with.  Tab
  pointed out and explained the thread rooted at
  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2014Feb/0115.html ,
  which addresses these concerns, and Daniel conveyed this
  explanation back in the message starting this thread.

  (2) Encapsulation.  I said that I don't have a strong opinion on
  this topic, and am inclined to be somewhat deferential to the
  research Google has done on the topic, given that they've been
  putting a lot of effort into testing the usability of the
  technology they're building -- though I think it would be great to
  see a summary of that testing on a (wiki?) document somewhere.
  I'd be less comfortable moving forward with a less-encapsulated
  solution if we didn't agree (which everyone present seemed to)
  that doing things that require more encapsulation, such as
  standardizing how Web authors can interact with the innards of
  form controls, wait until we have such encapsulation.  I also
  found somewhat convincing the argument that having CSS enforce
  encapsulation where the DOM API does not seems silly (though
  reading more of the thread after the meeting, I realize the latter
  is also a current point of contention).  But I also said that
  other Gecko developers do have opinions on the matter, and I
  couldn't speak for them.

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
             And to whom I was like to give offense.
               - Robert Frost, Mending Wall (1914)