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Re: draft-ietf-html-style-00.txt & class as a general selector

> I like the '@' mnemonics. Perhaps we can rearrange our previous use of
> the character..
> 
>  > Which seems fairly regular and easy to parse - properly bracketed.  Then
>  > for notational convenience, when using CSS with HTML, we have the
>  > following short forms:
>  > 
>  >  . means  @CLASS = 
>  >  # means  @ID =         or whatever token is chosen
> 
> Having a shorthand for ID is not only a syntactical convenience;
> knowing that the attribute is unique will help implementors. We were
> thinking about a different shorthand:
> 
>   "x67y" { .. }

The trailing " does nothing, though, just as the trailing ] did nothing.

>  > This gives a concise and regular notation, it seems.
> 
> Yes, and is very much in line with CSS thinking. A few questions
> remain:
> 
>  - should one also allow the more verbose versions (CLASS=foo,
>    ID=x67y) in CSS1?

I think so. This encourages people to build in parsing which is trivially 
extended to cope with arbitrary attributes used in selectors when CSS2 
arrives.

>  - what do people prefer, 
>  -- #x65y or "x56y" ? 
>  -- @CLASS=foo or [CLASS=foo] ?

I guess I have already voted ;-) but should point out that the particular
representations of the delimiter tokens were just examples, albeit ones I 
would be happy to live with. The important point was that each token should 
mean something and that meaning should be explained in human-readable terms 
somewhere near the beginning of the CSS 1 document. I was also aiming for 
a situation where the parser need not backtrack or buffer; the meaning of 
a string should be known before it is read, and everything should be 
properly delimited and umambiguous.

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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Received on Friday, 8 December 1995 10:09:48 UTC