Re: "fighting it out between WGs" (was: inline CSS)

Chris Wilson wrote:
[...]
> I don't like your implication, in jest or not.  There have been a wide
> variety of people in this discussion saying that the loss of the inline
> STYLE attribute is a mistake; only one of them has been from Microsoft.
[...]
> I don't hear a clear consensus that the inline STYLE attribute is a
> legacy the web community wishes delete.

You know, most everyone I've heard from is either a past or current 
member of the CSS working group or a Microsoft employee. And the 
most recent message was you, yet another Microsoft employee, not 
simply member of the 'web community'. Looking back over the archives, 
any lack of consensus you're trying to establish seems to be only 
the noise you guys are making. The two representatives in the HTML 
WG from the HTML Writer's Guild (representing over 110,000 web 
authors worldwide) have been pretty strong advocates of the decision
made by the HTML WG to deprecate the 'style' attribute into the 
Legacy module. 

I guess I'm just a little bit tired hearing representatives of the
world's most powerful software company claiming to represent the 
will of the 'web community', not that I doubt for a minute you guys
could find a whole bunch of people to suddenly flood this list with
support for your position. I think I remember James Salsman
performing similar feats. Argument by attrition, I think it's 
referred to in high school debate.

> If your goal is to get away from stylistic associations in 
> (X)HTML documents, why do you even allow <STYLE> elements 
> and <LINK>1 stylesheets?

Conflating the two may serve your argument, but I've never stated that 
as a goal, nor is it one. I have no problem with external or embedded 
stylesheets, just the style attribute. I like CSS stylesheets just fine 
and use them on my own web pages. I'd love it if they were implemented
more consistently (the default CSS2 stylesheet for HTML looks *horrid*
in Netscape), but I won't harp on the designers for that problem.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim, SGML Grease Monkey         <mailto:altheim&#64;eng.sun.com>
XML Technology Center
Sun Microsystems, 1601 Willow Rd., MS UMPK17-102, Menlo Park, CA 94025

   the honey bee is sad and cross and wicked as a weasel
   and when she perches on you boss she leaves a little measle -- archy

Received on Tuesday, 22 February 2000 18:24:35 UTC