whatwg / html

HTML Standard
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/
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Overuse of the word "step" makes reading history navigation hard #8617

Open smaug---- opened 1 year ago

smaug---- commented 1 year ago

There are algorithms like "Append the following session history traversal steps" and there "steps" means basically a lambda, some other algorithm but "current session history step" has nothing to with that, it is a number, apparently.

Could we rename some of this?

@jakearchibald @petervanderbeken

smaug---- commented 1 year ago

And looks like there is also https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#she-step

domenic commented 1 year ago

I think it's ok to use both meanings of a word and let context disambiguate. We can keep this open to see if anyone else gets confused, but it hasn't showed up as an issue so far.

petervanderbeken commented 1 year ago

I also got confused a couple of times by this.

jakearchibald commented 1 year ago

Is 'step' in general confusing, or only where history algorithms also deal with algorithm steps? We could always call them 'algorithm steps'.

Or the history concept of 'step' could be renamed to something like 'position'.

smaug---- commented 1 year ago

"step" is confusing because it is used in so many different places meaning totally different things with session history. I haven't ever considered "step" being confusing in spec algorithms in general.

"position" or "session history position" or some such might help.