Re: Unstyled Content (was Re: Draft suggestion: "normal" needed)

"Al Gilman" <Alfred.S.Gilman@IEEE.org> wrote in message 
news:p06110410befdd1d5c760@[10.0.1.2]...
> The way I read Appendix H [1] in the current Working Draft of XHTML 2.0,
> browsers are not required to implement CSS but they are required to
> make the default appearance as described in the provided CSS stylesheet
> available to the user.  For example when the author does not link
> to a stylesheet or the user turns stylesheets off.

This is absolutely a bad idea, styling of unstyled content is one of the key 
ways user agents differentiate themselves, seen as a lot of users are 
incapable of configuring their user agents they choose their user agent by 
the one with the default rendering to their design.

Then there's the problem that people will assume the background colour will 
always be white so not bother setting it, because that's what this default 
says it has to be, a user who changes this in his user stylesheet to allow 
comfortable access to pages will no longer get accessible pages.

Then there's the bad PR value in making an XHTML 2 user agent which renders 
content in high contrast but doesn't support CSS to be non-conformant, 
despite being more accessible to its audience.

Jim.

Received on Friday, 15 July 2005 21:50:06 UTC