Specifying style notation in <link>

I feel that it would be useful to have a standard <link> attribute 
that indicates the style-notation of a linked style sheet, perhaps 
along the lines of:

<link rel=style href="[uri]" type="[notation]">

The notation-string could also have a defined syntax, e.g.:

"notation//conformance-level"

This would then look something like:

<head>
<link rel=style href="format.css"    type="CSS//1.0">
<link rel=style href="format.css2"   type="CSS//2.0">
<link rel=style href="format.sty"    type="NaviStyle//1.1">
<link rel=style href="format.dsssll" type="DSSSL-Lite//1.0">
<title>A Styled Document</title>
</head>

Reasons for this extension:

 * Some servers still cut off file-extensions at three 
   characters, making it very difficult to reserve distinct
   extensions for every possible notation and conformance level.

 * Different vendors may try to use the same extension to identify 
   their style notations. (How many other vendors besides NaviSoft do 
   you think are going to want to use '.sty'?)

 * Sending out HTTP requests to get the content-type of every sheet 
   listed could cause a noticable delay in loading a document.

 * Even with the current set of content-types, misconfigured
   servers are a frequent problem.  A succession of many new 
   content-types for style-sheets could exacerbate this problem. 
   (This is to say nothing about documents which are being served by 
    protocols which do not pass the content-type at all.)

There should also be some way of associating a style sheet with certain
display properties or platforms, although it is not clear to me how 
this could be gone about. 

--
Michael Seaton(mseaton@inforamp.net)

Received on Thursday, 30 November 1995 00:08:46 UTC