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Define "descriptor" and "property" somewhere #5633
As far as I can tell, we don't actually <dfn> "descriptor" or "property" anywhere. We touch on this in Syntax, § 5 Parsing, defining declaration:
Declarations are further categorized as "properties" or "descriptors", with the former typically appearing in qualified rules and the latter appearing in at-rules. (This categorization does not occur at the Syntax level; instead, it is a product of where the declaration appears, and is defined by the respective specifications defining the given rule.)
It's come to my attention that some people who've been around for browsers for a long time don't understand the difference here, and we don't really ever make this super clear.
This ends up relevant in places like CSSOM where we talk about "supported CSS properties" but it doesn't cross-reference anything for what a property is!
Style sheets influence the presentation of documents by assigning values to style properties. This section lists the defined style properties, and their corresponding list of possible values, of CSS1.
Ok, we've added dfns for property and descriptor and also improved the definition of declaration (and defined 'property declaration' and 'descriptor declaration') in be5e75b
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svgeesus commentedon Oct 20, 2020
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The specification which introduced the term "descriptor" used it a ton of times and never once defined it.
Web Fonts
W3C Working Draft 21-July-1997
But hey, CSS1 was pretty hazy about properties too:
svgeesus commentedon Oct 20, 2020
This is something I tend to need to cover when presenting about webfonts.
[css-cascade] Define 'property' as a term. #5633
[css-syntax-3] Define at-rule and descriptor. #5633
fantasai commentedon Jan 14, 2021
Ok, we've added dfns for property and descriptor and also improved the definition of declaration (and defined 'property declaration' and 'descriptor declaration') in be5e75b