Re: inline CSS (was: is anyone interested in XHTML?)

On Wed, 23 Feb 2000 00:45:05 -0500 (EST), Arjun Ray (aray@q2.net)
wrote:
> 
> One reason that comes to mind is that, *going forward*, CSS isn't the
> only stylesheet language that's going to be around.  This is the same
> problem as the event attributes all being Javascript-specific today.
> The contents of the style attribute are necessarily notation-specific,
> but there are no obvious means of determining what that notation is.
> So, what entitles anyone (including software) to simply - or is it
> blithely! - *assume* that the contents of the attribute are in fact
> CSS, and not some other language?

The HTML 4 spec actually does provide a method for determining the
content type of inline style attributes.  The method is described in
section 14.2.1 (the default is 'text/css', and there are two ways to
override) [1].  It is clearly stated in section 14.2.2 [2] that this
applies to the style attributes.  Similar provisions apply to event
attributes [3].

I'll refrain from discussing whether or not this is a good solution,
simply because I don't have the time right now.

However, I will comment that this is tested within Ian Hickson's
importtest [4], and Mozilla passes (although I think it currently works
only with META elements, and not real HTTP headers [5]).

-David

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#default-style
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/present/styles.html#h-14.2.2
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/scripts.html#h-18.2.2.1
[4] http://www.bath.ac.uk/~py8ieh/internet/importtest/main/defaultlanguage.html
[5] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3248

L. David Baron    Sophomore, Harvard (Physics)    dbaron@fas.harvard.edu
Links, SatPix, CSS, etc.     <URL: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
WSP CSS AC                      <URL: http://www.webstandards.org/css/ >

Received on Wednesday, 23 February 2000 01:25:59 UTC