Re: The (new, enhanced) viewbox property

Tab Atkins Jr.:

> > Tab Atkins Jr.:
> >>No, CSS applies, the language as it stands, not any obsolete snapshots
> >>of the standard like 2.0.
> >
> > No, SVG 1.1 clearly references the CSS 2.0 recommendation.
>
> Doesn't matter.  The living CSS is what is actually used.  That
> reference is a spec bug, nothing more.
>

It looks like a common problem currently, that many members of
W3C groups do not understand, what a specification or recommendation
is, what often results in such statements and suboptimal quality of current
drafts or recommendations.

> >>Once again, you misunderstand what was actually defined by CSS.  I'm
> >>far past the point of hoping to educate you on this matter, but for
> >>the edification of other readers, here's how CSS deals with units:
> >
> > Well, as an experimental physicist I know what an absolute unit of
> > length is
>
> So does everyone else in this thread and the relevant working groups.
> That's not relevant here.

Well, if this is the case, don't hasitate to use your knowledge to improve
the current situation ;o) 

...
>
> The ratio that Windows reported was, for many years, 96.  I'm well
> aware that there were other types of ratios.  96 was by far the most
> common reported ratio, which is why the 4:3 ratio was assumed by
> authors.

Ken Stacey noted already, that microsoft seems to have missed to
get this right - what is surprising, because I learned already, maybe
in the last century, that X11 does the job, extracting this data from 
the monitor.
Else in most cases microsoft reuses lots of features from others,
but obviously here they failed completely. There must be millions of 
people paying money for this - what do they with this money, if they are
not even able to copy this from X11? ;o)
But I cannot see, why bugs in one specific operating system should
be a reason to corrupt the meaning of absolute units in CSS - bad 
idea to propagate bugs from one outdated/incomplete operating system 
to others, who want to do useful and meaningful things with their 
computers...

>
> We didn't pull this out of nowhere.
>
> > There seems to be a need for authors to indicate, whether size matters
> > or not for presentation.
>
> Regardless of this, the 4:3 ratio can still hold.  You're attacking
> the ratio, which is nonsense; the absolute size of a px is
> theoretically arbitrary.

I'm not attacking something, I just informed about the fact, that
several problems about sizing of SVG documents or fragments
appear, because usual browsers have bugs in interpreting 
units (not only absolute) - this is relevant for this discussion, 
because if this is not fixed, it will not help to add more and more 
text and definitions to SVG 2, because this will not help to solve
the real problem. Browsers will continue to provide arbitrary 
presentations of SVG documents concerning the size, whatever
is defined somewhere - and the confusion about units in CSS 2.1
is part of the problem. Because this part of CSS is borked, it should 
not be reused in other meaningful drafts and recommendations.
And if it turns out, that implementors are not willing to interprete
absolute units, those need to be depreciated, to indicate to authors,
that they will not get what they specify, if they use them.

...

>  Please stop
> diverting every single thread about units with your misunderstanding
> over this issue.
>

Indeed I did not start this, you started to propagate your desinformation,
please stop doing so and face the currently discussed problems ;o)

The reason, why this problems appear again and again, especially
for SVG is, because it is not solved and there are use cases suffering
from those bugs. 
Everytime someone complains about usage of units in SVG, practically
one has to say, that is does not work due to bugs in browsers, therefore
it is not meanigful to look at the presentation of those browser to get an
impression, what could be correct.


Olaf

Received on Wednesday, 8 January 2014 09:21:37 UTC