RE: Beyond Netscape ML

Pam Kagan writes:

 > Perhaps, though, a "dominant" element (image or paragraph)
 > can be specified as being a priority item and load first...in some future
 > version of CSS.

Two issues will need to be worked out: how one specifies a "priority"
and what the priority means.

Let's do the latter first. People have mostly been asking for
influence over network download order and color fidelity (mostly due
to a limit on simultaneous colors). For a while, I thought these two
could be combined into one, e.g. a new "visibility" property. Setting
visibility to "high" would give it relative priority in the download
que as well as in the color lookup table. Chris Lilley has argued
convincingly that network and color are two different issues that must
be solved differently or not solved at all. So, we need two new
properties, how about "speed" and "fidelity"? We still don't know
exactly what these will do, but the names are good indications.

Now to the other issue, how is this specified in a CSS style sheet?
The above suggested names are property names, i.e., they attach a
certain value to an HTML element:

  IMG.icon { speed: high; fidelity: low }

This works fine as long as the image urls are not in the style sheet
itself. But, consider:

  UL { 
    list-style: disc url(fancydisc.gif);
    background: url(dullbg.png) white;
    speed: slow;
    fidelity: high;
  }

Using CSS properties, there is no way to set different 'speed' and
'fidelity' values on the two images.

Another option would be to use somethign a la "! important":

  UL {
    list-style: disc url(fancydisc.gif) ! speed: fast ! fidelity: high;
    background: url(dullbg.png) white ! speed: slow ! fidelity: medium;
  }

But it looks a little messy.

Comments welcome.

-h&kon

Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
http://www.w3.org/people/howcome  howcome@w3.org

Received on Wednesday, 3 July 1996 16:00:01 UTC