13:15
<Noam Rosenthal>
WebKit shipped it first so it seemed like a good interop candidate? I wish those discussions were public TBH
14:42
<Noam Rosenthal>
I remember conversations here about "abstract operation" being a legacy thing used only to link to Ecmascript... am I hallucinating? Couldn't find official documentation of this
15:31
<Luke Warlow>
https://matrix.to/#/!AGetWbsMpFPdSgUrbs:matrix.org/$GGIAyoeqcNC8XU5GC9IdvjHe_qKZQ_H-VnpMRYcNtS8 - yes it's mostly ecma related. I don't think it's legacy per-se but I don't think it's used much either.
17:45
<Noam Rosenthal>
Just received a PR with those so not sure if to treat it like a matter of taste or a matter of convention
18:19
<Luke Warlow>
They are/were used in the trusted types spec, so it might be more common in W3C specs and just not super common in whatwg
21:42
<Noam Rosenthal>
thanks Luke!
21:56
<jmdyck>
I'm looking at grammatical ambiguity in the HTML spec, found a couple examples. The form is roughly something is a thing whose X is foo and is bar, where it's ambiguous where the is bar attaches: does it modify something or X?
21:56
<jmdyck>
One example is in 4.10.19.5 Enabling and disabling form controls: the disabled attribute:
21:57
<jmdyck>

the element
is a descendant of a fieldset element whose disabled attribute is specified,
and
is not a descendant of that fieldset element's first legend element child, if any.

21:58
<jmdyck>
(This is disambiguated by knowing that it doesn't make sense to ask if an attribute is a descendant of something.)
21:58
<jmdyck>
Other example is in 6.8.6 Writing suggestions:
21:59
<jmdyck>

element
is an input element
whose type attribute is in either the Text, Search, Telephone, URL, or Email state
and
is mutable;

22:00
<jmdyck>
(Disambiguated because you don't ask if an attribute is mutable.)
22:06
<jmdyck>
In 6.8.6, you could avoid the ambiguity by swapping the order: "element is mutable and is an input element whose ....", but that doesn't work for 4.10.19.5.
22:08
<jmdyck>
I suppose both could avoid ambiguity by repeating the elided subject. (e.g. "the element is a descendant of A and the element is not a descendant of B") ("element is an input element whose ... and element is mutable")