Re: Why the STYLE element (and attrib) shall not be in XHTML2 (Was:Re: Why is the style tag restricted to the head?)

Jan Roland Eriksson writes:

> Or alternatively; can the CSS-WG give a 100% guarantee that nothing
> that can be written in a stylesheet (in any styling language in fact)
> contains a character sequence that would send any XML compliant parser
> astray if it treats STYLE element content as #PCDATA?
> 
> No, of course not, such guarantees can never be given;
> 
> So my conclusion is that the STYLE element shall disappear from the
> upcoming XHTML2 spec and that style information shall be accessed only
> through reference by the application level in a client that needs it.

Not going to argue here about the desirability of allowing/disallowing
a STYLE element in XHTML2 (following your structuralist argument, even
LINK should be removed, in favour of a style sheet link in the HTTP
header, which the HTTP WG unfortunately removed), but one comment on
the syntax of CSS:

You are correct that we cannot give guarantees that CSS will never
include syntactical elements that are special to XML, but we have
always tried to avoid using such elements, even when there was only
SGML and no XML yet. One reason I don't want to give guarantees is
that XML may change and we probably don't want to change CSS just
because XML did; and the other reason is that we may, if there is a
*very* good reason, indeed use "<" or "&" for some infrequent symbols,
since it is not really that hard to use &lt; and &amp;.

(In fact, I think CDATA sections should be removed from XML: they are
ugly, not needed, and make parsing hard. But that is a different
discussion again.)



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos/                              W3C/INRIA
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Friday, 9 August 2002 22:10:28 UTC