Proposal: Default style definitions for elements

Folks -

I would like to make a proposal that I think would significantly benefit
everyone. For whatever reason, current HTML specs (as far as I can find) do
not provide any standard default style definitions for the elements. This is
a major problem, because HTML authors, for right or wrong, rely upon the
default style definitions in their Favorite Browser of Choice, and then get
in a huff about "evil, non-compliant browsers" when their HTML does not look
right in Other Browsers. This has been a problem for 15 years as far as I
can tell. I am sure that the browser vendors would appreciate not being
blamed anymore for these problems. :)

While it is clear that I support the full and complete separation of
semantics from presentation, I also believe that HTML authors should
reasonably expect that their Web page will display the same across all HTML
compliant browsers, without them needing to specify the values for every
single CSS property that could apply to every element used. Realistically
speaking, that is the only way to ensure that a page will never stumble upon
differences in default styles, and it is not realistic to expect that at
all.

I am not sure what I need to do on my part to have this become an "official"
proposal for discussion/wiki-fication/yada/yada/yada/, but please let me
know and I will be glad to do that.

J.Ja

Received on Tuesday, 3 June 2008 20:11:45 UTC