2003-09-15 22:13 UTC You may now sacrifice virgins to ensure there are no last call comments
This past weekend was quite a significant weekend for personal reasons, but of more interest to you, is the fact that The CSS2.1 Last Call Working Draft has been published! (announcement)
Some of the major changes to look at:
- The "computed value" of many properties has changed. For example, percentages on most properties now inherit as percentages, not lengths. Inheritance always uses the computed value now. All properties now have a line in their property definition that specifies exactly what the computed value for that property is.
- Margin collapsing is now well defined. As part of this, we redefined how clear works.
- The definition of containing block has been reworked to be much more well defined (amongst other things, it removes the very confusing contradictions that snuck into CSS2).
- There is now an entire appendix devoted to explaining in what order things should paint.
- There is now a well defined white-space processing model that defines exactly which spaces should go where, even in bidirectional contexts.
- The inline box model has been tuned, and now explicitly mentions struts in two places, in order to explain how 'line-height' works on blocks.
- We've added some new values: orange, pre-wrap and pre-line, inline-block.
- Backgrounds are better defined (or more explicitly undefined in the case, for example, of background images on inline elements).
- The first-line and first-letter pseudo-elements are now very much better defined.
- The :before and :after pseudo-elements are now much more flexible. (This is setting the way for the CSS3 Generated and Replaced Content module, which makes them even more flexible.)
- We revamped the way overflow and clip work to be better defined and more useful.
- All the many errata for CSS2 (there were hundreds) have been merged into the text.
For those of you who doubt that there have been many changes between CSS2 and CSS2.1, and think that the working group was just slow, it may be educational to look at the diff marked version. Look at chapter 9, for instance.
Oh, and GwieF was most amused that I managed to get his name into the spec. Tee-hee!