Re: [BULK] - Re: [XHTML2] Spirit of "1.1.3. XHTML 2 and Presentation" (PR#7759)

On 2/9/06, Garret Wilson <garret@globalmentor.com> wrote:
>
> At first, Ian's request seems perfectly reasonable, and succinctly put.
>
> Upon closer examination, there is not such a tension between the text of
> 1.1.3 and the presence of the style attribute, any more than there is a
> tension between the text of 1.1.3 and the <style> element. Although
> section 1.1.3. does indicate that XHTML 2 is "removing all presentation
> elements", the style attribute is not a presentation element. It's not
> even a presentation attribute, in the sense that "fontSize" or
> "lineSpacing" would be presentation attributes. In other words, the
> style attribute's *value* contains stylesheet information bound to a
> single element, much in the same way that the <style> element's textual
> content contains stylesheet information mapped to individual elements
> within the document. Presentation attributes, in my opinion, would be
> those in which the attribute name represented a style predicate, with
> the attribute value representing the value of that style predicate.

However, the binding mechanism is very different here. Remember style
is more like a specialized version of <link> than anything else. Think
of style as <link href="data:blah" /> rather than an element inside
the document.

The style attribute has no such linkage. Style attributes don't allow
full stylesheets to be applied to the element they're attached to
(e.g. pseudoclasses are missing).

> Lastly, I'd like to personally express my desire to retain the style
> attribute. With newer AJAX applications, it is many times extremely
> useful, if not necessary, to send style information to a browser for
> small updated within a document. The lack of a style attribute would
> mean that dynamically updating the style of a single element within a
> document would require somehow modifying an external stylesheet or the
> internal stylesheet in the document's <head>.

There may be the need for the ability to apply something directly to
an element, but that doesn't necessarily have to be the style
attribute. Also since the "ideal" is to have XHTML work without
Javascript if necessary, I don't see how that can be a requirement.

--

Orion Adrian

Received on Friday, 10 February 2006 02:11:37 UTC