Day 9 of 100DaysOfSpec, 2.4 Common Microsyntaxes, contd.

I am reading and taking notes on the HTML specifications for 100 days as part of #The100DayProject. Read the initial intent/backstory. I am a Microsoft employee but all opinions, comments, etc on this site are my own. I do not speak on behalf of my employer, and thus no comments should be taken as representative of Microsoft's official opinion of the spec. Subsections not listed below were read without comment.

The big takeaway from this section as a whole, for me, is seeing how much is involved in handling numbers.

2.4.4.3 Floating-point numbers

I had to looking up floating-point numbers because the spec assumes some familiarity with it. I either have never heard the term "significand" or have forgotten it from a math class long ago; there was also no clear-cut example to visualize. Wikipedia (sorry) has more info on floating points.

2.4.4.4 Percentages and lengths

Confused as to why the algorithm for "parsing dimension values" would return numbers >= 1.0, or an error. For lengths I think that makes sense (for example, a text value has characters or it doesn't), but wouldn't there be a need for %s smaller than 1? I think I'm misunderstanding something about how this algorithm would be used or what it's supposed to measure. Need to start tagging these notes with "TO-ASK" ;]