Re: text-shadow and text-decoration

At 20:25 2002 03 07 -0500, Peter B. West wrote:
>The editors,
>
>7.16.5 "text-shadow" has offsets defined in terms of "horizontal distance to the right" and "vertical distance below" the text.
>
>The section also specifies:
>Inherited:  no, see prose
>
>There is no mention of inheritance in the prose of section 7.16.5.
>
>7.16.4 "text-decoration", likewise, has:
>Inherited:  no, see prose
>
>It does discuss inheritance.
>
>"This property describes decorations that are added to the text of an element. If the property is specified for a block-level element, it affects all inline-level descendants of the element. If it is specified for (or affects) an inline-level element, it affects all boxes generated by the element. If the element has no content or no text content (e.g., the IMG element in HTML), user agents must ignore this property."
>
>This is confusing because it seems to imply that the property *is* inherited.  Also, if the last sentence quoted is taken to mean, "if the element has no text content user agents must ignore this property," how is this property to affect specified fo:character elements within its ambit?  Is it the intention that the property apply to all implicit and explicit fo:character elements descended from the element on which it is defined?  Is the complication here to do with the handling of inline-progression spacing?
>
>Peter West

Peter,

You are correct that "inheritance" for text-shadow and text-decoration 
is somewhat [at loss for a word here--let's say "unusual"].  This comes
directly from CSS.  

See http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/text.html#propdef-text-decoration where
it says about text-decoration, "This property is not inherited, but 
descendant boxes of a block box should be formatted with the same decoration 
(e.g., they should all be underlined). The color of decorations should remain 
the same even if descendant elements have different 'color' values."  It does
something similar with text-shadow.

The idea is that the property is not inherited in the usual sense that would
imply behavior as if the property had been specified on each descendant, but
rather it is "logically" inherited.  (The difference is exemplified by the
second sentence of the quote above--if it were truly inherited, the underline
would change color, but that is not the desired behavior.)

paul

Received on Friday, 8 March 2002 12:12:06 UTC