- From: Florian Rivoal <florian@rivoal.net>
- Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 23:21:23 +0900
- To: Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org>
- Cc: James Craig <jcraig@apple.com>, Shane P McCarron <shane@aptest.com>, Janina Sajka <janina@rednote.net>, W3C PF - DPUB Joint Task Force <public-dpub-aria@w3.org>
> On Feb 15, 2016, at 18:01, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote: > > Florian, > > I hear you. User style sheets have been around, I used to use them until they were stopped being used. Actually, in this case, I believe it is not even the usage of user style sheets, but rather the usage of alternate style sheets that would be closer to the usage patterns we are talking about, but they also disappeared from usage. Alas! > > We have to analyse the reasons. Of course, browsers' unwillingness to properly implement them is one, but there may be others; like the extreme and, frankly, arcane complexity of the Web page structures and resulting CSS that make the usage of, say, user style sheets extremely complex because most of the user have no understanding of what is happening. I have not followed the evolution of how these approaches became unused. What was never made available to the broad public of web users is a tool somewhere between the current developer tools and a wysiwyg environement that would let you tweak the look and feel of a page and save the result as a user stylesheet. Without something like that, the feature was always restricted to web users who are also web authors, making it a fringe / advanced feature. On top of that, there has been a long term trend in web browser design (I'd say early versions of Google Chrome were influential in this) in streamlining browser UIs to make them easier to use and palatable to the broadest numbers, which has generally resulted in features "for advanced users" being removed. Opera went against that trend more than most, but eventually joined the pack. > So what is next? What is the way of moving ahead? From a standards point of view? I am not sure there's anything we can do. If a vendor wants to provide the feature, I think they have what they need already. If they don't want to, I doubt specifying things in a different way is going to make any difference. - Florian
Received on Monday, 15 February 2016 14:21:50 UTC