Re: Border at top of the page

#11

Scripsit Ben C:

Quote:

It's not clear what you mean by "this"

By "this" I mean suppressing the top margin of when it is the
first child of body, _except when it is preceded by text_.

They are obscure, aren't they? They tend to obscure and mislead rather
than help, yet we use them much - too much. I mean pronouns, of course.

So instead of the simple case <body>foo... and the margin for ,
which seemed (to me at least) to be the topic, you were referring to
<body>foobar...
and not the margins of foo but the top margin of in that context.

Indeed _that_ presentational feature cannot be described in CSS 2.1.

But let's remember that we _also_ have the case of <body>foo...,
where Firefox behaves differently depending on doctype sniffing. This is
just mad, and any features with <body>foobar... are probably
connected with that madness rather than designed separately.

Quote:

Besides, the HTML specifications do not specify the default
rendering of documents, and they do not require that the default
rendering be describable in CSS
2.1 (since HTML is independent of the very existence of CSS) or that
it be described at all.

I know. But we aren't discussing HTML here. Surely I don't need to
remind you this is comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets.

Yet doctypes are just about markup, and specifically about formal
syntax, with no defined connection with styles.

Quote:

What non-conformance?

I'm thinking specifically of this one:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/com...f763337eb69cb6

That is either a bug or a non-conformance. My money's on bug.

It looked too complicated. The message seems to discuss CSS issues, yet
it's in the HTML group. Are you referring to HTML or CSS conformance?
And non-conformance _is_ a bug, by definition.

Quote:

A browser may display elements with pink background on Sundays,
and you still cannot claim that it is non-conforming because of that.

I do claim that, unless it's using JS.

Please cite the relevant part of the conformance clauses.

Quote:

If there's no style in the cascade that sets background-color: pink on
p> then must have a transparent background. Your browser is
non-conforming on at least one day out of seven.

You are implying CSS. HTML specifications don't. There is nothing in
HTML specs that prevents the behavior I described. How does CSS change
that? Do CSS specifications require that presentation is under the
control of CSS completely? I don't think they do.

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

#12

On 2007-11-27, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

Quote:

Scripsit Ben C:
[...]
I'm thinking specifically of this one:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/com...f763337eb69cb6

That is either a bug or a non-conformance. My money's on bug.

It looked too complicated. The message seems to discuss CSS issues, yet
it's in the HTML group. Are you referring to HTML or CSS conformance?

CSS conformance.

Quote:

And non-conformance _is_ a bug, by definition.

I'm happy with that definition.

Quote:

A browser may display elements with pink background on Sundays,
and you still cannot claim that it is non-conforming because of that.

I do claim that, unless it's using JS.

Please cite the relevant part of the conformance clauses.

If there's no style in the cascade that sets background-color: pink on
p> then must have a transparent background. Your browser is
non-conforming on at least one day out of seven.

You are implying CSS. HTML specifications don't. There is nothing in
HTML specs that prevents the behavior I described. How does CSS change
that? Do CSS specifications require that presentation is under the
control of CSS completely? I don't think they do.

Of course not. But background colour _is_ under the control of CSS
completely.

Section 3.2 (of CSS 2.1) explains that to claim conformance you have to
do the cascade and give every element a value for every applicable
property.

So the must have a value for background-color, either the initial
value or some value specified somewhere in the styles.

Then later on in 3.2:

A user agent that renders a document with associated style sheets
must respect points 1-5 and render the document according to the
media-specific requirements set forth in this specification.

I think that means it has to draw the background the colour that the
background-color property says it is.

If you set pink, then you must get pink, every day of the week.

But is there anything to say that the initial value of a property (which
may be pink) can't depend on the day of the week? Well it doesn't say
that specifically I suppose, but only because it's obviously ridiculous.

#13

In article <slrnfkoq81.hdj.spamspam (AT) bowser (DOT) marioworld>,
Ben C <spamspam (AT) spam (DOT) eggs> wrote:

Quote:

On 2007-11-27, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

And non-conformance _is_ a bug, by definition.

I'm happy with that definition.

Surely that is stretching the word too far. If it was a
deliberate choice against the standards, it is an unhappy
description of it as a bug.

--
dorayme

#14

dorayme wrote:

Quote:

In article <slrnfkoq81.hdj.spamspam (AT) bowser (DOT) marioworld>,
Ben C <spamspam (AT) spam (DOT) eggs> wrote:

On 2007-11-27, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

And non-conformance _is_ a bug, by definition.
I'm happy with that definition.

Surely that is stretching the word too far. If it was a
deliberate choice against the standards, it is an unhappy
description of it as a bug.

Your right it is not a bug but a *MS Feature*

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

#15

In article <644fa$474c841a$40cba7bd$27805 (AT) NAXS (DOT) COM>,
"Jonathan N. Little" <lws4art (AT) centralva (DOT) net> wrote:

Quote:

dorayme wrote:
In article <slrnfkoq81.hdj.spamspam (AT) bowser (DOT) marioworld>,
Ben C <spamspam (AT) spam (DOT) eggs> wrote:

On 2007-11-27, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

And non-conformance _is_ a bug, by definition.
I'm happy with that definition.

Surely that is stretching the word too far. If it was a
deliberate choice against the standards, it is an unhappy
description of it as a bug.

Your right it is not a bug but a *MS Feature*

OK Jonathan, perhaps you are humouring me <g>. But there does
seem to me a distinction between the deliberate (even reasoned)
departure from standards (not just from MS) and inadvertent
consequences from code,

(I am having trouble with getting and sending to alt.html via my
MT-Newswatcher ng software but not other groups? Messages are
stuck "being sent" in the sense that if I try to quit my
newsreader it says a message is still being sent ... from maybe
an hour back! And some are not appearing as sent. Anyway, have
you noticed any trouble with alt.html? Perhaps I have to ring my
ISP and ask them if there is any trouble with their news server
software?)

--
dorayme

#16

On 2007-11-27, dorayme <doraymeRidThis (AT) optusnet (DOT) com.au> wrote:

Quote:

In article <slrnfkoq81.hdj.spamspam (AT) bowser (DOT) marioworld>,
Ben C <spamspam (AT) spam (DOT) eggs> wrote:

On 2007-11-27, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

And non-conformance _is_ a bug, by definition.

I'm happy with that definition.

Surely that is stretching the word too far. If it was a
deliberate choice against the standards, it is an unhappy
description of it as a bug.

I'm equally happy with your definition

It's mainly just a matter of choosing what to quibble with Mr Korpela
about. This mistake/non-conformance distinction was tangential to the
main point which concerned the definition of a quirk.

Of course there is a difference between something that doesn't work as
intended and something that does but where the intention differs from
the specification (which actually sometimes is a quirk).

But often the word "bug" is just used to mean "something which needs
fixing", which covers both.

Formally you can (only?) show that something's wrong with a program by
demonstrating its failure to conform to a specification, usually with a
test case. You could argue that a deliberate choice against the
standards is correct but according to a different specification and
therefore not a bug (even on Mr Korpela's definition). How reasonable
that is depends on the absurdity of what you're claiming as a
specification. So the definition of bug as non-conformance still works
in these cases.

#17

dorayme wrote:

Quote:

(I am having trouble with getting and sending to alt.html via my
MT-Newswatcher ng software but not other groups? Messages are
stuck "being sent" in the sense that if I try to quit my
newsreader it says a message is still being sent ... from maybe
an hour back! And some are not appearing as sent. Anyway, have
you noticed any trouble with alt.html? Perhaps I have to ring my
ISP and ask them if there is any trouble with their news server
software?)

I am always having problems, but the causes are not so mysterious. The
nearly dozen trees, yeah trees not branches, slung in the phone trunk
line a short ways down the road might have something to do with my
trouble because Verizon puts priority on stockholder profits over basic
infrastructure maintenance. A real sore spot for me where a decade ago
deregulation and rate hikes were supposed to finance a fiber network to
"Wire America for the Millennium". Yeah, right! Still stuck on dialup
almost 8 years in... Also my little local ISP cannot seem to keep their
servers patched and...well who knows? I do notice of the 3 NGs a mostly
monitor alt.html seems to be the flakiest.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

#18

Jonathan N. Little wrote:

Quote:

I am always having problems, but the causes are not so mysterious. The
nearly dozen trees, yeah trees not branches, slung in the phone trunk
line a short ways down the road might have something to do with my
trouble

Please excuse a wild deviation from CSS discussion, but you reminded me
of my own connection problems. They happened only in the late spring,
and only on wet days. British Telecom was mystified. Then I solved the
problem myself by observation. Being late spring there was a family of
jackdaws nesting in my false chimney. Their fledglings were using my yew
tree as their first landing point on their first flights. The combined
weight of the fledglings was making the branch sag until it touched my
phone line. When it was wet, this tended to short the line to ground.

I pruned off that branch, and have had no problems since, apart from the
occasional jackdaw squawk "Where the **** has our perch gone?". British
Telecom, bless them, replaced my "bare wire" line with an insulated one
when they heard of this problem, so I don't have to worry even when the
tree grows back. Neither do the jackdaws.

--
Steve Swift
http://www.swiftys.org.uk/swifty.html
http://www.ringers.org.uk

#19

Steve Swift wrote:

Quote:

Jonathan N. Little wrote:
I am always having problems, but the causes are not so mysterious. The
nearly dozen trees, yeah trees not branches, slung in the phone trunk
line a short ways down the road might have something to do with my
trouble

Please excuse a wild deviation from CSS discussion, but you reminded me
of my own connection problems. They happened only in the late spring,
and only on wet days. British Telecom was mystified. Then I solved the
problem myself by observation. Being late spring there was a family of
jackdaws nesting in my false chimney. Their fledglings were using my yew
tree as their first landing point on their first flights. The combined
weight of the fledglings was making the branch sag until it touched my
phone line. When it was wet, this tended to short the line to ground.

I pruned off that branch, and have had no problems since, apart from the
occasional jackdaw squawk "Where the **** has our perch gone?". British
Telecom, bless them, replaced my "bare wire" line with an insulated one
when they heard of this problem, so I don't have to worry even when the
tree grows back. Neither do the jackdaws.

Yeah didn't me to get off track on a tear, but the data line had a hum
so loud that the technician could not understand me on that line! Just
got it fixed. and extremely corroded terminal block at street-side. Just
galls me that I am in the richest country in the world but we are "3rd
world" in our communications infrastructure.

--
Take care,

Jonathan
-------------------
LITTLE WORKS STUDIO
http://www.LittleWorksStudio.com

#20

Scripsit Ben C:

Quote:

It looked too complicated. The message seems to discuss CSS issues,
yet it's in the HTML group. Are you referring to HTML or CSS
conformance?

CSS conformance.

However, doctype sniffing affects the rendering even when no style sheet
is present. Actually we can use style sheets to _nullify_ the effect of
doctype sniffing in these issues, by adding explicit rules for margins
(adding a wrapper for the "loose" or "anonymous" text if needed).

Quote:

Section 3.2 (of CSS 2.1) explains that to claim conformance you have
to do the cascade and give every element a value for every applicable
property.

Yes, but does this exclude the possibility of affecting the rendering
with something external to CSS?

Quote:

But is there anything to say that the initial value of a property
(which may be pink) can't depend on the day of the week? Well it
doesn't say that specifically I suppose, but only because it's
obviously ridiculous.

Why would that be ridiculous? Browsers are allowed to have different
default rendering for documents, or different browser style sheets. Why
couldn't a browser have different defaults in different days. I think
you agree that a browser update might modify the defaults; it changes
the browser to a slightly different browsers. Why couldn't the defaults
change otherwise? Or we could just define the different behaviors as
updates. :-)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/