Re: Conversion of HTML attributes to CSS2 properties

David Perrell wrote:
> 
> Frank Boumphrey vehemently wrote:
> 
> >>"The UA may choose to honor presentational hints from other sources than
> >>style sheets, for example the FONT element or the "align" attribute in
> >HTML.
> >>If so, the non-CSS presentational hints must be translated to the
> >>corresponding CSS rules with specificity equal to zero. The rules are
> >>assumed to be at the start of the author style sheet and may be overridden
> >>by subsequent style sheet rules."
> >
> >What this gibberish basically means is that a user agent can choose to
> >display styling type tags provided there is no conflicting CSS rule!!

Sort of

> Close. How about: "A user agent may display HTML element styling attributes,
> such as 'align', 'color', and 'face', provided there are no conflicting CSS
> rules in the author stylesheet." ?
> 
> >The rest is semantics!!
> 
> I believe that's semantically incorrect. The rest is *gobbledygook*.
> Semantics is what remains when the gibberish and gobbledygook are
> exclusively-ORed.

I believe that is gobbledygook. The wording in the specification is a
more precise formulation of whether such hints are to be processed and
if so, how; in particular, what happens when there are partially
conflicting CSS rules. 

The wording makes sense when read in conjunction with the specificity
and cascading algorithms. The advantage of precise wording is that
impleentations can implement the same way and thus, hopefully, give more
consistent results.


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                             http://www.w3.org/
Graphics and Stylesheets Guy      The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)492 387 987         06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 7 August 1998 10:32:12 UTC