Re: HTML3 <OL inherit> gone for good?

At 12:37 PM 3/13/95, Brian Behlendorf wrote:
>> For example, people at our site have been putting in centered headings with
>> the Netscape specific <center> tag. I have been explaining to them, with
>> some success, that if they do it the HTML 3.0 way like this:
>>
>>   <h1 align="center">
>
>The current HTML 3.0 draft still allows this, and I'd argue to keep this
>(look at <URL:http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/paras.html>).  This
>is all about how future development should move - should we continue to
>add align= attributes to every body tag one by one, and then color, and
>then size, and then font style.... or should we generalize and
>*ironically enough save ourselves some effort* and go for style sheets?
>We need to consider the mess we would be in if people misinterpreted
>experiments as features (as many are now) and we went crazy with
>adding HTML attributes.

A third alternative is to define a bigger set of presentation attributes
and say that these can apply to a large class of tags (rather than adding
them piecemeal).

I think style sheets were viewed as a way to avoid putting more of this in
the DTD (which is potnetially open-ended); but picking some set of "top
ten" presentation attributes and making them apply widely is still an
option. If we do this, we might want to make clear that some or all are
advisory and cannot be rendered on all platforms. (Though if someone wants
to use blink or color to carry semantics, there is not saving them from
their folly.)

(I wish Netscape would _talk_ about their extensions in public before
putting them in software releases. They seem to operate by "It is easier to
get forgiveness than permission.")



---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu

Received on Monday, 13 March 1995 13:17:13 UTC