Fixes for “curated” branch

[SofyaPovarova]

Hi from JetBrains!

We are investigating the possibility of using webref JSONs for automated validation of the CSS property values in JetBrains IDEs. I noticed that several JSONs contain entries without value descriptions and wonder if JSONs in the “curated” branch could be closer to the original specifications and more machine-friendly so that we could use the webref data right away for automated validation.

I’ve created two issues as examples:

1. Add “value” field to “<dimension-unit>”
2. Move “<color>” “values” to “<named-color>”

I hope my suggestions make sense and thank you very much for maintaining the webref repository.

[tidoust]

Hi @SofyaPovarova. Thanks for reaching out!

The curation process in Webref is really intended to fix (hopefully temporary) inconsistencies that emerge from time to time in the original specifications, for instance situations where the same CSS property is defined in two different specifications. It is not meant to create data that the original specification does not already expose in a machine-readable way.

To improve the quality of the data that appears in Webref, our general approach is not to do more curation in Webref, but rather to improve the specifications themselves, by raising issues or preparing pull requests against them. We try to reduce the amount of manual maintenance that we need to do to keep the data in Webref up-to-date. A side goal is also to improve the quality of the specifications. There may be other ways to achieve the same results.

Said differently, we don't want the data to "be closer to the original specifications", we want the data to be "in the original specifications".

I'll reply to the individual examples that you raised. Both of them are illustrative of improvements that could be brought to the original specifications. If you could help with that, that would be terrific! Things are slightly easier with IDL specifications, as they use Web IDL which is easy to extract. The value definition syntax is used less systematically in CSS specifications, making it harder to extract machine-readable information all the way down to values.

[SofyaPovarova]

Many thanks for the detailed explanation! I hadn't considered fixing value definitions in specs, but I agree that's the right approach