Re: UA style sheet for <q>-- why required?

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 12:07 AM, Robert J Burns <rob@robburns.com> wrote:

> Without a default UA stylesheet (or some equivalent
> styling mechanism) then the best a UA could
> do would be to present the DOM tree as simply a tree

That is already some styling; I was talking about the extremely basic
degrade-to-text option, in which all elements are replaced by their
content -- effectively stripping out the element names and attribute
information.

...
>> I'm thinking not just of the big browsers, but of
>> smaller tools, like plucker.  (www.plkr.org)
>> Arcane rules in the error-correction section
>> are bad, but unavoidable.  Odd exceptions within
>> even the section for perfectly valid documents is
>> worse, and raises the barrier to entry.

[Plucker does not -- and probably never will -- implement all the
error correction, even once it is documented in the standard.]

> I'm not clear on what you're saying here. However,
> since support for CSS 2 and HTML 4.01 is all we
> need for sufficient default styling of quotations,
> then I don't think that should be a barrier to entry.

Plucker does not support CSS.  It has been on the TODO list for a few
years, but ... given that plucker continues to support monochrome
160x160 pixel screens, the styling will never be extensive.

There is (usually) a step which replaces unknown characters, but there
is nothing else that modifies the text itself -- as a change to
quotation marks would require.  I'm not saying it couldn't be done,
but it would require an extra pass, and special logic, and ... maybe
that development time is better spent elsewhere.

-jJ

Received on Friday, 31 October 2008 04:49:42 UTC