Re: About dropping the style attribute

On 23 Jun 2007, at 23:25, Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo wrote:
> I've realized now that the current spec drops the style attribute for
> all elements except for the <font>, but I can't understand the
> reasoning behind those decisions.


Bimly I missed that one when reading the differences from HTML4  
document!

Considering that most CSS files are not generated by a server side  
scripting/programming language, how would you generate dynamic styles  
without the @style attribute?

I have done a couple of websites where flat CSS files have been used  
to create the overall look and feel of the website, but the odd rule  
is tweaked in the HTML, which has been generated by PHP.

A site I was working on a while back faded the background colour from  
black to white depending on the time of day... taking that the CSS  
files are cached, it made sense to add a @style attribute on the  
<body> tag to set the background colour... do I take it that I will  
now need to add 100 or so classed to a pre-made style sheet, and then  
set the class on the body tag?

As another example, we had a 1000+ page website... the headings had  
to use a special font, so we created the usual <h1> tags, with the  
text, and set the background-image though the @style attribute on  
each page individually... all other rules relating to the heading  
were in the external style sheet... so does that mean we have to  
create thousands of classes as well?

Personally I would prefer that we ditched the <font> tag before we  
lost the @style attribute...

I would have thought that anyone who knows how to use the @style  
attribute will know about external style sheets, and therefore know  
that they should be used to hold most of the rules.

Craig

Received on Saturday, 23 June 2007 23:10:41 UTC