Re: Style sheet misuse advice

At 02:45 AM 28/01/97 -0500, Gordon Blackstock wrote:
>| If one were to set Text and Link colors using a
>| style sheet, should one also define the background
>| colors for these elements as well?
>
>Since there is no practical way to know in advance, or at the time of
>rendering, what the default settings of a browser may have been changed to
>by a viewer, then it makes good sense to specify all colors if any are to
>be changed by a document.  Without this precaution it is possible (it's
>happened to me) that portions of the document can be invisible to the
>viewer.  I would agree with Urban F. and go even further by adding that the
>design is incomplete without all color bases covered.  

I don't see how one can cover all colours since CSS1 allows a literally
infinite number of colours to be specified.  It's not as easy as with
HTML's BODY attributes, where there are only five colours that one can
give.  With CSS1 and the interaction of author and user style sheets, an
author would have to specify colours for not only BODY and the various A
pseudo-classes, but also P, EM, STRONG, CITE, P CITE, P STRONG, P STRONG
EM, TABLE, UL, UL UL, UL UL UL, etc., etc.

I think I'm leaning towards the suggestion that background and color
properties always be given together.  The reason that I've never committed
to this advice is that it still seems somewhat "not right" that an
undesired highlighting effect could appear if the user, for example,
overrides the BODY background but not the link background.  Since this
would only leave a page unreadable in a small minority of situations
(depending on the colours involved), I questioned whether it wouldn't be
better for users in these situations to turn the author's style sheet off.

However, I suppose that the awkwardness of an undesired highlighting effect
would be better than having users stare at a document with unreadable links.

Liam Quinn
liam@htmlhelp.com
http://www.htmlhelp.com/%7Eliam/

Received on Tuesday, 28 January 1997 11:16:51 UTC