Re: CTP's UL, OL, LI proposal.....

>Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 10:48:14 -0800
>From: Charles Peyton Taylor <CTaylor@wposmtp.nps.navy.mil>
>To: www-html@w3.org
>Subject:  RE: CTP's UL, OL, LI Proposal.... -Reply
>Message-Id: <s1a19f8a.086@wposmtp.nps.navy.mil>
>content-length: 3094

>I will not argue that style sheets are not the better
>way of doing things, but they are not supported in 
>browsers today (although the messages from Chris 
>Wilson and Thomas Reardon give hope that they will
>be soon.) 

I'll admit I'm definately hoping, and if Microsoft does pull off a 
successful implementation of stylesheets, Netscape would be NUTS not to 
follow suit, which in the end means that authors will finally have the 
great control (to a degree) of their documents that they desired.

>Images (as in <img>) are used now, so it 
>seemed reasonable to use the attributes
>from the <IMG> tag.

>Also, even though they have the list-style
>property, they do not *yet* have a means of 
>specifying height and width values, which, as I 
>said before, make a dramatic difference in the 
>speed at which a document is displayed.

Agreed.  If there is a method of improving loading/layout speed of any 
document I'd support it.  But, there is always the hope that a real smart 
stylesheet implementor will take this into account when the interpreter 
encounters height and width.

My one big gripe about putting this in the HTML is this.  The IMG tag 
is designed explicitly to handle an image, and the attributes SRC, 
HEIGHT, etc modify the appearance of the IMG.

But what if you used that same reasoning, how would you respond to seeing 
the following in a HTML file?

<LI SRC=dot.png HEIGHT=50>Bananas

Does HEIGHT modify only the bullet, or the line height for the entire 
List Item (does HEIGHT even stretch or shrink the height of the text in 
some cases??)

Hokon Lie recommended a pseudo-element based on my previous posting, that 
would be called something like "LI:index".  With this setup, you could 
change any special attribute to the element that you could for any 
element.  So we could change the height, width and the spacing.  But we 
could also change the color, the background color, the baseline 
alignment, the borders and even the margins. (CSS info/WD at 
http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-css1.html)

I wouldn't want to ignore the potential this could add as far as giving 
the author more control over the appearance of the document.  HEIGHT and 
WIDTH could be used as depreciated elements during the interium, but I'd 
only recommend so if there isn't a major browser out there with support 
for CSS.

Finally, I read the CSS spec again and noticed that the bullets for list 
items were refered to as "labels" in section 4.1.  So, would it be better 
off to change "LI:index" to "LI:label" for consistancy?

>C  h a r l e s    P e y t o n   T a y l o r        
>ctaylor@nps.navy.mil



----------------------- Christopher P. Josephes ----------------------------
Email |  mailto:cpj1@winternet.com
Web   |  http://www.winternet.com/~cpj1/

Received on Thursday, 23 May 1996 01:01:19 UTC