pseudo-elements in positioning (was: RE: Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets)

Jon's response brought a question into focus for me:

Given the example in the draft, I imagine one of the main uses of the
positioning properties in the proposal will be to create menu bars of
the sort we naughty document designers now misuse tables to produce.

CSS1 defines some pseudo-elements such as 'first letter' and
'first-line' that user agents have the option of implementing. Maybe
this extension could use a 'menu' pseudo-element which the user agent
can decide how to display such as a line of links at the bottom of a
screen in a text based agent?

Given support for the positioning draft and CSS1, a menu would be a
simple item to implement on documents intended for display on a
graphical user agent, and would still be readable on user agents which
don't implement CSS1 and positioning. But a pseudo-element would enable
a document's creator to emphasize the context at display time.

Bill Humphries <whumphri@epri.com>
On-line Communications Consultant
Electric Power Research Institute
Palo Alto, California

>----------
>From: 	bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
>Sent: 	Tuesday, February 4, 1997 12:42 PM
>To: 	www-style@w3.org
>Cc: 	bosak@atlantic-83.Eng.Sun.COM
>Subject: 	RE: Positioning HTML Elements with Cascading Style Sheets
>
>[Chris Wilson:]
>
>| If all processing is done on the server, you're essentially shipping RTF
>| to the client...
>
>Not exactly; if you ship HTML (or XML, for that matter) with embedded
>style attributes designed for a VGA display, then the computer driving
>the LCD panel on a gas pump or cell phone can simply ignore the style
>attributes and start over with what it can figure out from the tags
>themselves.  It couldn't do that with RTF, unless you mean RTF with
>meaningful style names.
>
>Jon
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 4 February 1997 17:15:04 UTC