[whatwg] Styling <details>
Jukka K. Korpela
jkorpela at cs.tut.fi
Sat Apr 9 07:51:15 PDT 2011
Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> We would like our
> implementations to be compatible as far as author styling is
> concerned, and so it is very useful to discuss the fine-tuning of CSS
> styling before we ship. If we did not do this, then you and every
> other author would most certainly complain when Opera and Chrome ship
> incompatible implementations that require vastly different approaches
> to styling.
No, I would not, and when authors start using <details>, their first concern
is, or should be, whether users will recognize the element's rendering as
something that provides optional access to detailed information. This
usability issue is crucial and should be tested widely, and we need
_different_ implementations in order to be able to evaluate different
approaches.
> Authors have been yelling for author-styling in relation to many other
> elements in the past.
Authors yell a lot. You should care more about usability and other aspects
of good design than the sounds of authors who are eager to author-style
everything. You can't please everyone.
>> Why does <details> need to have any ”disclosure triangle”?
>
> The default appearance needs a disclosure widget of some kind, either
> a triangle or plus symbol or whatever.
It needs to convey the message of optional availability of additional
information and an intuitive way of taking the option. It is far from clear
how this could best be achieved. As I wrote, we would need to see some
implementations before worrying about how to describe them in CSS terms.
When (or if) some reasonable implementation approaches will be found, they
will most probably need some new features added to CSS.
>>>> I know that many CSS property names are misleading. But
>>>> list-style-type, as defined in published CSS recommendations, isn’t
>>>> bound to any ”::marker”.
>>>
>>> It certainly is, in the Lists spec.
>>
>> Please cite the recommendation by its official name and/or URL.
>
> http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-lists/#marker-pseudoelement
The document says:
"This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other
than work in progress."
(Markers were in CSS 2.0, and they were dropped out in CSS 2.1. I'm not very
optimistic about seeing them well designed and implemented anytime soon.)
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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