Wish: 'Show applied style' tells only half the story

Scenario:

Load page http://pages.prodigy.net/chris_beall/Amaya/Inheritedstyle.html

Select the second paragraph (Use F2 so the whole paragraph is selected).

Style
  Show applied style
Result: It says "No style rule for this element", which is, literally true,
i.e. there is no style rule applied to all <p> elements, of which this is
one.

BUT, page doc\html\style_sheets\handling_external_css.html, which is the
Help for this function, says,"...it's difficult to understand why an element
is displayed with that color or these margins, etc. To help the user, Amaya
provides a Show applied style command that displays into an external window
CSS style properties applied to the first current selected element."

In the case shown above, the user is not helped at all, because the style we
are looking for is applied as a result of inheritance, and the 'Show applied
style' function does not deal with that.

I wish the display would contain two sections, the first being the data we
see today, and the second, titled "inherited", showing those style
properties that this element inherits and where they come from.

Inheritance is one of the powerful tools of CSS and is widely used, which
makes it likely that the "difficult to understand why" problem often
involves an unrecognized inheritance.  Providing this information would add
value to Amaya as a development tool (not to mention its value for debugging
of pages created with less astute tools).

Chris Beall

Received on Thursday, 23 February 2006 00:39:08 UTC