Re: The style attribute, again

At 17:11 -0400 2003-05-12, Simon Jessey wrote:
>Unfortunately, many content developers do not have access to, or are not
>allowed to alter, the master style sheet(s) of a site. They may not even see

	yes agreed. Content developers often doesn't have access to 
the master stylesheet.

>a document's <head> element. This is typical of many large corporations.
>Often, a developer must resort to a little style attribute here and there.
>The style attribute does no harm. Although I rarely use, I do see a need for
>it to remain in the specification.

Yes, you're right and you know what will happen. If big corporation 
see that a small developer can change the look of the content with a 
local style attribute... they will block it in the content management 
system... and we have an XHTML 2.0 where the style attribute will not 
be used.

The problem is not only a question of reality, it's also a question 
of policy in large companies.

I have discussed that with Daniel, quite a few times.

CSS is cascading and you can have more than one link in the head.
If the system really wants to authorize a local stylesheet, they 
could do like that.

<link	rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
	href="http://www.example.com/corporate.css" />
<link	rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
	href="./thispage.css" />

Another possibility in a corporate environment is to have something 
on a user base

<link	rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
	href="http://www.example.com/corporate.css" />
<link	rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
	href="http://www.example.com/user/MrJourdain/thispage.css" />


If the style attribute is in the XHTML 2.0 spec, it will be necessary 
to constraint its use to avoid messy document like we had with font 
tags. It means there will be a need for a strict rules of 
implementation in authoring tools.

Why?

because there's always a difference between a document that you write 
for the first time and a document which has been edited 25 times... 
Each time someone is adding a new style information in the document, 
you will have a messy document full of span elements and style 
attributes.


-- 
Karl Dubost / W3C - Conformance Manager
           http://www.w3.org/QA/

      --- Be Strict To Be Cool! ---

Received on Tuesday, 13 May 2003 17:43:20 UTC