RE: draft-ietf-html-style-00.txt & class as a general selector

On Fri, 8 Dec 1995, Chris Wilson (PSD) wrote:

> Chris Lilley wrote:
> >If it is affected for no reason .... then why on earth should HTML be 
> extended 
> >to cope with formatting changes that occur for no reason?
> 
> I believe he meant content- or document structure-based reason.  Obviously, 
> there is a reason - you want the style to change at that point.

Does anyone have an example of a reason for any style that is *not* based 
on either the content or the document structure, besides Chris Lilley's 
example of ransom note (see below).  I certainly can't think of one - why 
emphasize a certain piece of text if the content of that particular 
piece isn't particularly important, unless it helps to clarify the 
document structure?

> >Lets be clear here:  a change to HTML hs been proposed so it can 
> >do *ransom notes*  ?  Given the goals of HTML this is clearly nonsense.
> 
> Where did "ransom notes" come from?  Let's try to keep the discussion on 
> track...

"Ransom notes" makes perfect sense to me - when you write a ransom note, 
you want to randomize your style to make it hard to identify the author.  
Think of the visual cliche: the ransom note that is written by cutting 
individual words (or letters) out of a large collection of magazines and 
newspapers, and then pasting them onto a sheet of paper.  Do you want to 
encourage people to write html like that?

David

Work: seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca         Home: 6420 36th Ave.
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Received on Friday, 8 December 1995 12:22:34 UTC