Re: Font Style Elements

On Tue, 4 Mar 2003, Wingnut wrote:
> Ian Hickson wrote:
> > semantic. The style information can always be split from the markup,
> > because it is not part of it. (This is one of the many reasons [1] that
> > the style attribute itself is unnecessary.)
> >
> > [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2003Jan/0277.html
>
> Again, Ian... not necessarily true.  In a "node viewer"  application, it
> might OFTEN be desireable that the style travel with the node.

I am unsure what you mean by a "node viewer application". Could you expand
on this?


> In fact, I predict that MOST transcluded documents (made from pieces &
> parts of other documents)  WILL have style attributes in the nodes...
> instead of trying to translate stylesheets or style tags from many
> sources... into the new transcluded document.

Why would you have to merge stylesheets?

Style is independent of the content. There is no reason why your content
should have headers than are 2em high and blue on white. Content authoring
should concentrate on content authoring, not content styling.

This is currently common-place with large content syndication systems. For
example, RSS feeds do not include style information. Similarly, news feeds
such as the Associated Press do not include style information with their
articles. In both cases, the content publisher applies his _own_
stylesheet to the content. Indeed, this is one of the ways content
publishers compete against each other: restyling of syndicated content.


> Finding/extracting rules found in stylesheets, and rules in style
> elements... and converting them to style attribute strings... will
> become a common function of "node harvesting".  Just my opinion.

That would be a sad day indeed. In any case, such "node harvesting" would
lose much of the expressive power of style languages. For example, CSS can
style elements based on whether they are targetted by the fragment
identifier (:target pseudo-class) or whether they are currently contained
in an element that follows another (combinators). Short of merging the
entire stylesheet into the content, which can already be done by using
<?xml-stylesheet?> PIs and data: URIs and doesn't require style attributes
at all, there is little that can be done here.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 5 March 2003 13:04:33 UTC