Hi everybody, I'm looking at this section of the Style System Documentation:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Mozilla_Style_System_Documentation#Style_contexts_and_the_rule_tree I realise this is a fairly old document (2003) and if you know a newer version please let me know. I wonder if the tree is the "happiest" metaphor for the structure of the rule tree or if maybe its type should be further qualified/ clarified. When I think to a tree I think to a graph in which each node has only one parent but may have many children. However, when I think to a possible rule tree I can only think to a more generalized directed graph, were a child -may- share more than one parent. In fact it seems to me that the rule tree is dependent on the structure of the document and this kind of messes up my brain because it seems to suggest that every time the document structure changes the rule tree must be refreshed too. Take these four rules: 1) div {background-color:red} 2) div.blue {color:blue} 3) div.pink {color:pink} 4) div#mark {border:1px solid orange} To me, the rule tree of these four rules can take all sorts of different shapes depending on the specifics of the document. Take the following examples as isolated, in separate documents: This uses rules 4 and then 1, the rule tree is a simple graph with one segment: <div id="mark" /> Uses rules 4, 3 and finally 1, the rule tree is a simple graph with two consecutive segments: <div id="mark" class="pink" /> My understanding is that in this case the rule tree is effectively a diamond, with rule 1 at the top, rule 4 at the bottom and rule 2 and 3 being children of 1 and parents of 4: <div> <div id="mark" class="pink" /> <div id="mark" class="blue" /> </div> Am I correct? Does the rule tree change shape depending on the structure of the document? Is it true that children rules may potentially share parent rules? I'm trying to understand how the rule tree is generated but all I can imagine is, rather than a tree, a braid of rules, each strand starting with a document's element, each strand ending at the "null" rule and each strand made of a list of rules, some of which may or may not be shared by other strands. Manu _______________________________________________ dev-tech-layout mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-layout
