Re: Who provides the stylesheets

At 12:38 PM 10/26/2000 , Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>Would you point to a few examples of (1), use of classes and id's that would make it difficult to write third party stylesheets.  I agree that's a serious problem, but  I think I want to address it differently, and concrete examples may shorten the discussion (I hope  :-)  ).

Well, here's a little test I just did.  I took four sites with
stylesheets which I personally have designed (which means that
they follow similar principles and/or names for classes, which
means they should be MORE compatible, not LESS compatible, than
other sites):  The Virtual Dog Show (http://www2.dogshow.com/),
Idyll Mountain Internet (http://www.idyllmtn.com/), the HTML
Writers Guild (http://www.hwg.org/), and my own personal site
(http://kynn.com/).

I then shuffled around the stylesheets to see what results.  In
some cases things were just fine; in others, they're inexplicably
wrong.  (At least, from the standpoint of an average user.)  For
example, some of the dogshow pages are green when they have other
stylesheets applied, and some are not.  All pages with a certain
stylesheet -should- look the same, right?  But they don't in many
cases.

You can see the experiment at http://kynn.com/working/styledemo/
-- the files are named <site>.<stylesheet>.html, or just <site>.html
for the original CSS (for comparison's sake).  The main thing to
note here is _no reliablity_; it gets worse, not better, if you try
this with stylesheets produced by different people for vastly
different web sites.

--Kynn

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Thursday, 26 October 2000 16:10:58 UTC