In the difference between formally specified language and project-specific magic words, perhaps it is the latter which should be considered of higher value even though the former may be more easily useful. I'm not sure any should override any. Let's say I have: <hi rend="mySpecialFormat" rendition="#specialFormatNumber2" style="float:left;clear:both;color:red;">text</hi>. What does that mean? Why should one stylistic thing take precedence over another? Why shouldn't it all be additive? i.e. This is in mySpecialFormat, whatever this is, and that is further documented by the CSS in #specialFormatNumber2 and in addition it is floated left and red.
If you mean additive in the CSS sense, then the order of addition is crucial, at least when conflicting property values appear. If one component specifies block display and centre alignment, whereas another specifies inline display, whichever is last will win, at least in CSS, unless !important is also in the mix somehow. This may be the root of Syd's concern about "sequence indeterminate", although I agree with you that we really shouldn't allow the order of whitespace-separated tokens in an attribute value to be significant. Syd is presumably arguing for @rend to function as @n does ("The value of this attribute is always understood to be a single token, even if it contains space or other punctuation characters..."). I would not like to see that -- like you, I think it would be a step backwards. If you want to describe the appearance of something in running prose, the solution is @rendition -> <rendition>. Cheers, Martin On 15-07-18 07:16 AM, James Cummings wrote:
On 18/07/15 04:43, Syd Bauman wrote:
Not necessarily disagreeing with the discussion on order. The basic choice is whether locally specified magic words are to be considered closer to the encoder's intention than those translated to a formal description language. But I wanted to comment on this:
But the idea that @rend has to be made of tokens (rather than a string) seems incorrect to me; @rend is defined as 1 to inifinity of data.word ... when council has discussed this in the past consensus was that it cannot and should not be a phrase containing whitespace but a set of tokens. e.g. "big blue wiggly" vs "This text is written big and blue and wiggly". Perhaps 'token' is not the correct word here, but whitespace separated discrete values. Otherwise we are reversing the sensible war on text bearing attributes.
and the idea that they must be "sequence indeterminate" is at best confusing, at worst hogwash.
If I'm understanding correctly, I would strongly disagree with you on this. I firmly believe that rend="big blue wiggly" is and must be considered the same as rend="blue wiggly big". This is a set of magic words (hopefully documented in the ODD) and no precedence or structure should be intended by their order. 'Sequence indeterminate' might be a confusing way to say that, but I'm assuming it means that there is no determined order to the sequence of whitespace separated strings. i.e. that they can be given in any order and mean the same thing.
And why does @style override @rend? I'm not sure.
I think I'd prefer the reverse (but I'm not sure).
I could be convinced of that. In the difference between formally specified language and project-specific magic words, perhaps it is the latter which should be considered of higher value even though the former may be more easily useful. I'm not sure any should override any. Let's say I have: <hi rend="mySpecialFormat" rendition="#specialFormatNumber2" style="float:left;clear:both;color:red;">text</hi>. What does that mean? Why should one stylistic thing take precedence over another? Why shouldn't it all be additive? i.e. This is in mySpecialFormat, whatever this is, and that is further documented by the CSS in #specialFormatNumber2 and in addition it is floated left and red.
-James