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

On Sat, 10 Aug 2002 00:25:28 +0200, you wrote:

>Jan Roland Eriksson writes:

>> Or alternatively; can the CSS-WG give a 100% guarantee...
[...]
>> 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...

Sure, be my guest. (in fact that element was next on my agenda :)

>in favour of a style sheet link in the HTTP header, which the HTTP WG
>unfortunately removed),

I'm not all convinced that stylesheet references belong at protocol
level. OTOH we already have a recommendation for how to link style
information to XML instances.

  <http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-stylesheet/>

If XHTML2 shall be a conforming application of XML, and we can once
and for all forget about this hydra named "backwards compatibility",
then lets make some practical use of that rec even in XHTML2.

And lets all try to create a new XML based HTML version now, that
among other things, as far as possible builds on the same philosophy
as CSS in its "forward compatible parsing" concept.

>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...

I knew that.

>...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;

That's the other side of the medal, yes.

So my conclusion stands; information that is irrelevant to document
structure shall not be allowed to be included in the doc instance.

>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;.

You may also think about the possibility that some one may want to use
a completely different presentation language together with XHTML2.

>(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.)

Agreed, but can't be done at this point I'm sure.

-- 
Rex

Received on Saturday, 10 August 2002 05:56:52 UTC