At 02:05 PM 5/27/02 -0400, Patrick Lam wrote:
>I stumbled across the following comment:
>
>       /*
>               Jeff, I weakened the following assert because we
>               *want* to represent no tabstops as an empty string.
>               If this isn't safe, let me know.   -- PCR
>       */
>       UT_ASSERT(p[1] /* && *p[1] */); // require value for each name
>
>It seems that we have a bunch of other empty props now too, like
>TF's new 'display' property.

Yeah.  That's my comment.  It's very un-CSS-like to not have a value for a 
given name, and if I'd thought of a better way to spec the tabstops value, I 
wouldn't have made the change. 

Likewise I empathize with TF's decision.  For good reasons, we don't use 
CSS's box formatting model, so there may not *be* an appropriate setting for 
our default behavior:

  - both inline and block from CSS1 are clearly wrong
  - both compact and run-in from CSS2 are also wrong 

Thus, in both cases, there's a weakly sufficient reason to *not* have a 
value for those specific property names.  

>Now, I've been working on some field code (bug: start typing in
>italics and insert a field; the field does not appear in italics!)
>and in fixing this bug, I get the corresponding assert in the
>attributes code.
>
>That's because a field has an empty string "" in its param attribute.
>Do we really want that?  If so, I'll weaken the attribute assert too.

Ick.  That sounds ugly to me too.  I doubt that this is by design, but you 
should check with Martin to confirm.  

Paul

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