Re: Style sheets for access

(the question is below the answer)

in HTML, H1 is a structural element. It specifies what role the block 
plays (in this case, level 1 heading). But it makes intuitive sense to 
view it as the name of a style, as well. In fact CSS begins by doing just 
this. The difficulty is that CSS then allows the major group H1 to be 
sub-classed. From a perspective of allowing users control, this 
introduces the difficulty raised in this thread.

It seems that a solution may be to reexamine the CSS rules. If these 
allowed greater weight for reader's rules than those of the author, and 
provided a mechanism where a reader could make general declarations but 
artificially raise their specificity, the problem may disappear.

As an example, if I could declare, in my reader screen styles that H1 
should be color:purple size:massive, and that this declaration was to be 
regarded as having the specificity of an H1 with a particular id and 
class attribute, it seems that the problem would go away. I have ignored 
the problem of author/reader precedence for the example. But that should 
be easily soluble.

Charles McCathieNevile
Sunrise Research Laboratory
RMIT University


I had written
> > The difficulty is introduced by CSS allowing user-defined sheets. In 
> > earlier HTML, there were a fixed number of Styles (H1, H2, P, UL
> > etc). 
On Thu, 4 Dec 1997, Daniel Dardailler replied
> H1, H2, O, UL are not style, they are structure&content. 
> 
> Style is for presentation, and when I write UL in a document, I mean
> "this is a list of items", the presentation is independent, you can
> voice it, print it, screen it, braille it, up to you.
> 
> Can you rephrase your issue ?