Re: the STYLE attribute

On Fri, 10 Nov 1995, Joe English wrote:

> 
> [ Sorry for the continued cross-posting, but this seems relevant 
>   to both mailing lists... ]
> 
> Hakon Lie <howcome@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> > Glenn Adams writes:
> >  > (2) it should be possible to include multiple STYLE elements, each using
> >  > different notations (in order to support the specification of appearance
> >  > not only with different style languages but also with different versions
> >  > of a style language).
> >  > 
> >  > (3) it would therefore be impossible to determine what notation a STYLE
> >  > attribute is using without introducing either (a) a convention which used
> >  > a prior STYLE element in HEAD to specify a notation which not only applied
> >  > to that element but which persists to subsequent elements which employed
> >  > a STYLE attribute (clearly this is a hack); or (b) an application
> >  > convention that a STYLE attribute always followed a particular notation;
> >  > (c) an additional attribute STYLE-NOTATION that would be concurrently
> >  > required with a STYLE attribute (a constraint that an SGML parser could
> >  > not validate).
> > 
> > (a) could work just fine, but there is a fourth alternative: an
> > attribute to the BODY tag. I believe someone suggested (Bill Perry?)
> > this during the workshop.
> 
> None of these solutions allow multiple notations to be used
> with a single document, though.  (``Click _here_ for HTML
> with Netscape-format style attributes, click _here_ for 
> HTML with Arena-format style attributes, click _here_ for PDF.'')
> 
> A STYLE attribute is not _necessarily_ a horrible idea, but 
> it's vital that a single style notation be standardized before
> adding it to HTML.

Not necessarily, so long as we stick to a STYLE element in HEAD with a 
NOTATION attribute, or to external stylesheets and content negotiation. 
On a purely experimental basis, I built Navipress and CSS stylesheets for 
one of my pages and used content negotiation very successfully to get the 
correct stylesheets for three different browsers. (The browsers were 
emacs w3-mode, Arena 0.97 and a Navipress beta.)

Benjamin C. W. Sittler

Received on Friday, 10 November 1995 16:53:41 UTC