Re: Floats need explicit width??

Olivier,

Thank you!

Doug,

Thanks!

All,

I think I should say that I'm opposed in general to the idea of 
"informational" messages of the type previously suggested for this 
issue.  I would support them only if they were then consistently created 
under either of the following analogous circumstances:
a) someone wne to the considerable effort to establish to what degree 
browsers supported a particular CSS version and its features and 
provided these messages for each browser version which failed to support 
that particular CSS version correctly.  Unlikely that I would get many 
takers for that task, although the analogy seems clear.  Can one imagine 
this applied to the html validator - given that so far no version of 
Internet Explorer has ever supported xhtml served as xhtml - so a 
warning anytime anyone submitted an xhtml document...
b) every time CSS changed its support for a given feature a  message was 
generated to alert validator users that the results might vary depending 
on when a browser using that  feature was implemented.  Again unlikely 
to hear from many volunteers, although the analogy again seems clear.

In a way there is a philosophical issue at stake here - why is that CSS 
does not provide a "csstype" or "ccsversion" indicator similar to html's 
doctype to allow a browser to vary its styling depending on what the 
author wished for.

Anyway, Olivier, once more merci!

Regards,
Paul McKeown.

olivier Thereaux wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On 6-Apr-09, at 8:51 AM, Douglas Perreault CPA* CITP wrote:
>> So, I apologize if my earlier suggestion may have lead people astray. 
>> Like Paul, I can no longer find any browser of consequence that 
>> requires an explicit float. And as Paul duly footnoted on the earlier 
>> thread, CSS 2.1 does not require them.
>>
>> So, I guess, my vote would be to simply stop checking for an explicit 
>> width on floated elements -- no warning or informational message needed.
>
> Thanks everyone for the mostly civil and constructive discussion on 
> the issue. I am the person who had added the warning in the validator 
> (based on the bug report in bugzilla, itself based on what the CSS2 
> specification said… before it was replaced by CSS2.1), and as such, I 
> appreciate that the community of users took the time to look into the 
> issue and draw solid conclusions.
>
> I'm patching the validator to remove this particular warning.  The 
> patch should hopefully make its way to the next release. I will let 
> the W3C staff chime in when said release is scheduled.
>
> Regards,

Received on Monday, 6 April 2009 16:24:27 UTC