Huge problem with HTML40 stylesheet

There is, as was pointed out on www-html recently, a huge problem with
the stylesheet in REC-html40:

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/style/default.css

On BODY, color and background-color are specified, but no link colors
are given.  This means if a user has a light-on-dark color scheme, the
links can easily disappear, since the light-colored links from the
user's color scheme will appear on a white background.  You need:

A:link { color: blue; }
A:visited { color: purple; }
A:active { color: red; }

or something like that to appear before the rulesets for a.normref and
a.informref.

If this requires issuing a new version of the spec (although I don't
think it should), I think it should be done.  W3C should be setting a
good example on how to use stylesheets.  (And yes, I do bug the
stylesheet people about their pages not validating.)

David Baron

Received on Saturday, 27 February 1999 10:39:40 UTC