[whatwg] return lowercase hex values for fillStyle and strokeStyle

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Tue, 05 Sep 2006 19:07:35 +0200, Nicholas Shanks  
<contact at nickshanks.com> wrote:

> On 5 Sep 2006, at 12:54, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>
>>>> Instead of returning an uppercase six digit hex value I suggest  
>>>> returning a lowercase value for compatibility with what UAs  
>>>> (including IE) currently do
>>>
>>> It may be the right decision on compatibility grounds, but other than  
>>> that lowercase hexadecimal digits (0-9, a-f) are almost always a bad  
>>> choice, because a, c and e have no ascenders like every hindu-arabic  
>>> decimal digit has and thus make the number harder to read. This  
>>> obviously does not apply to fonts with old-style numerals aka. text  
>>> figures, where 0, 1 and 2 have neither ascenders (like 6 and 8) nor  
>>> descenders (like 3, 4, 5, 7 and 9), but those are rather unlikely to  
>>> be used in a programming environment.
>>
>> I believe this, but I suspect that the gain in compatibility is well  
>> worth the minor loss in efficiency for people who are hand-coding.
>
> I disagree, and always prefer uppercase hex digits to lowercase ones, it  
> makes the numbers easier to read IMO.

That is, I think, what Christopher said and I agreed with. I still think  
that compatibility with deployed browsers should, in this case, trump that  
usability gain.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
   Charles McCathieNevile, Opera Software: Standards Group
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