Re[3]: comments on 2002-12-12 XHTML 2.0 WD

Hello Tim, everyone,

2002-12-30T23:34:56Z you wrote:
>> > It is however not entirely clear to me that icons do not belong in style
>> > sheets - they are, after all, essentially entirely presentational. On the
>> > face of it, icons of this sort do not fit into the CSS framework
>> > particularly well, as they seem applicable only to whole pages (or usually
>> > collections of pages), whereas CSS would tend to allow an icon to be
>> > suggested for any element(s) in a document; OTOH it is certainly not
>> > impossible to envisage ways in which icons for elements within a document
>> > might be used (e.g. an automatically generated outline).
>> Have a look at http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-ui-20020802#box-model.
>> According to the draft there's no need in "icon" value for <link>'s
>> 'rel' attribute.

> Sadly not: that describes displaying an icon in place of an element's
> normal content when rendering the document as usual.
Where exactly do you see "rendering as usual"? It all depends on the
intelligence of the UA.

> The desired
> functionality here is to provide an icon to represent a resource outside
> of this context.
I'm not so sure. In case you're right CSS authors would need to define
separate properties for icons in location field, icons in the
bookmarks, etc. That's not a wise approach imho.

> I suppose it could be shoehorned into this model, by
> saying that the UA is effectively, for example, rendering the entire
> document with a UA style sheet such as

> html {
>   display: icon !important;
>   icon: url(file:///some/default/icon)
> }
Well, I would say:
html { icon: url(http://somewhere.org/icon.png)
}

> but that seems horribly cumbersome.
What's so horrible about that? The spec says: An element's icon is not
used/rendered *unless* the 'display' property is set to the value 'icon'.
I've no idea where you want to use icons, so let's assume you add a
document to your browser's bookmarks. The agent sets the 'display'
property to 'icon' and removes the document from screen.

> It is tempting to extend the icon
> property to the effect that the icon(s) can be used in external contexts
> whatever the value of the display property; but I think that could
> interfere with the already proposed usage, especially if such behaviour
> were indeed not restricted to the root element (and I see no reason to
> impose such an arbitrary constraint). I feel a separate property would
> probably be better (though one might also want to rename the icon property
> at the same time to avoid confusion).
Disagree. Once again, look at the spec more closely. Extendable.
Forward-compatible. Easy.

---
  Alexander "Croll" Savenkov                  http://www.thecroll.com/
  w3@hotbox.ru                                     http://croll.da.ru/

Received on Monday, 30 December 2002 17:03:57 UTC