[xep-support] FYI: Side Effect of XEP's Treatment of Inheritance for Floats

[W. Eliot Kimber]

I've attached an updated version of my dropped capital sample. This adds 
two cases designed to test the ability for the markup to adapt 
automatically to changes in the base font size.

This markup scheme depends on the fact that by the FO spec floats 
inherit properties from their immediate containers. However, XEP turns 
this behavior off, which causes this sample to "fail" (in the sense that 
the behavior I wanted and get by the spec doesn't happen).

While I generally think that the reasoning behind not doing the 
inheritance is reasonable, there are already enough non-obvious 
inheritance problems that XEP doesn't or can't undo, that I'm wondering 
if its really wise for XEP to behave this way.

Obviously, this is something of a contrived example--if I was generating 
this FO I could easily generate the appropriate absolute font value for 
the dropped cap.

However, I'm starting to think that, from the point of view of an 
integrator who wants to make code that is as transportable as possible, 
that this variance from the spec, while well intentioned, hurts more 
than it helps since I still have to account for the behavior defined in 
the spec in any case.

That is, XEP's "fixing" a flaw in the spec doesn't help me because I 
can't count on it unless I'm willing to make XEP be the only FO 
implementation I plan to use, which is highly unlikely for a variety of 
reasons.

Now I have to both remember this difference in behavior (which I had 
forgotten until I started writing a bug report post, which became this 
post) and learn to code in such a way that the behavior is completely 
avoided. It also means that when I teach FO I have to go out of my way 
to mention the ways in which a given implementation is out of variance 
with the spec. That all translates into greater cost and opportunities 
for error and confusion in the use of FO.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber, eliot at isogen.com
Consultant, ISOGEN International

1016 La Posada Dr., Suite 240
Austin, TX  78752 Phone: 512.656.4139
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