How can we enable the user to define presentation beyond font size and colour?

Ian,

continuing the discussion around  involving users in the W3C process.

How can we enable the user to define presentation beyond font size  
and colour?
CSS user style sheets currently provide a useful means to define font  
sizes and colours.

However CSS provides many more presentation attributes that are  
generally not definable by the user. you may easily understand that  
it's my contention that as a function of author's control over the  
CSS WG, user style sheets like the one appended are pretty useless  
across domains.

Please find appended two real world examples of how users wish to  
repurpose web pages.**

Is anyone aware of published research into this area?
what work is ongoing within W3C steering group and CSSWG to ensure  
users will be so enabled in the future?

regards

Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessibility Consultant on Media Literacy and the Internet

** One from Danny Ayers stripping out everything but the text links.  
The other from me, an attempt to strip out everything that isn't  
illustrated with a picture:

it could be useful if a user style sheet could in the future mimic  
the server side project: 'barebones' from Danny Ayers which strips  
out everything but the text links:
http://danja.talis.com/barebones/test.html
when I get a minute I mean to update it to display only linked images  
with text like this:

using the simple style sheet attached visit
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
this demo needs the whitespace removed but I raised this issue with  
Håkon Lie and Andy Budd, it seems it's hard to impossible to improve  
on my solution, which Only works for the one domain.

you'll know much better than me from what I remember it seems that
body display none wrecks the DOM and one cannot then selectively add  
content.

this page gives a little more background
http://www.peepo.co.uk/mybbc/hints.html

user style sheet:

     body {background:#6aa !important;}
     body * {background:#6aa !important; color:#fff !important;  
visibility:hidden;}
     div.mvb,div.mvb a, div.mvb a img, div.o,div.o a, div.o a img 
{visibility: visible;}
         div.mvb a img, div.o a img{visibility: visible;  
border:outset; border-width:.6em; border-color:#6aa; padding:.5em;}

         div.mvb a img:hover, div.o a img:hover, div.mvb:focus,  
div.o:focus, div.mvb a img:active, div.o a img:active  
{background:white !important; color:#999 !important; border- 
color:#999; border:solid; border-width:.6em; padding:.5em;}




Jonathan Chetwynd
Accessibility Consultant on Media Literacy and the Internet



Begin forwarded message:
From: "~:'' ありがとうございました。"  
<j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>
Date: 29 November 2007 10:58:27 GMT
To: "Ian B. Jacobs" <ij@w3.org>
Cc: Danny Ayers <danny.ayers@gmail.com>, Andy Budd  
<info@andybudd.com>, process-issues@w3.org, timbl@w3.org
Subject: How can we enable the user to define presentation beyond  
font size and colour?

Received on Monday, 3 December 2007 13:08:52 UTC