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Bug 13019 - Organization of the user agent style sheet section makes it near-impossible to see whether it's correct
Summary: Organization of the user agent style sheet section makes it near-impossible t...
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: LC1 HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 critical
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2011-06-22 21:17 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2011-08-04 05:16 UTC (History)
7 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2011-06-22 21:17:28 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/rendering.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#the-css-user-agent-style-sheet-and-presentational-hints
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#the-css-user-agent-style-sheet-and-presentational-hints

Comment:
Organization of the user agent style sheet section makes it near-impossible to
see whether it's correct

Posted from: 71.184.125.56
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:7.0a1) Gecko/20110621 Firefox/7.0a1
Comment 1 Boris Zbarsky 2011-06-22 22:09:10 UTC 
In particular, the section is organized not by element(s) being styled but by properties being set.  Just determining what the border styles for tables look like involves reading two separate sections: "Fonts and Colors", "Punctuation and Decorations".  In the latter, two completely separate chunks of style information separated by prose need to be read.

It would make more sense to me, and make the specification much more reviewable, to have a section on table styles, a section on list styles, a section on alignment, a section on display types, and then see what's left.
Comment 2 Aryeh Gregor 2011-06-23 16:51:26 UTC 
How would you organize it by the element?  Often one rule affects a zillion elements.  Should it be split into lots of rules?
Comment 3 Boris Zbarsky 2011-06-23 17:02:01 UTC 
I proposed a specific start to the organization in comment 1.

For the rest, it depends.  There's clearly no need to have more than one rule for [disabled].
Comment 4 Boris Zbarsky 2011-06-23 17:03:05 UTC 
Maybe what's really needed here is organization by what rules are meant to do (as opposed to what properties they set to accomplish that goal, which is not quite the same thing).  The various table border rules are all meant to work together coherently, and should be organized that way.
Comment 5 Ian 'Hixie' Hickson 2011-07-02 00:12:53 UTC 
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:
   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Accepted
Change Description: see diff given below
Rationale: Concurred with reporter's comments.

I would appreciate careful review of the diff below to make sure I didn't screw anything up.

Also, this is just a first attempt at reorganising this to make it more usable. If you can think of anything to make it even more usable, please don't hesitate to file more bugs on this.
Comment 6 contributor 2011-07-02 00:13:16 UTC 
Checked in as WHATWG revision r6276.
Check-in comment: Attempt to reorganise the rendering section to make it more usable for implementors
http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=6275&to=6276
Comment 7 Michael[tm] Smith 2011-08-04 05:16:06 UTC 
mass-move component to LC1