- From: Bert Bos <Bert.Bos@sophia.inria.fr>
- Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 19:40:40 +0200
- To: kevinh@trico.com
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
kevinh@trico.com writes: > Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is a style sheet? We haven't tried to precisely define it, but informally it is something like this: A style sheet is a description of the layout of a document. It can be either the layout for one specific document, or for a whole class of documents. In our case, the style sheet is required to be machine-readable as well. Applied to HTML, this means that we make an (informal) distinction between on the one hand the structure/semantics of a document and on the other hand the way it is presented on screen or elsewhere. The first is HTML, the second is the style sheet: the style sheet is the recipe for taking the abstract structure expressed in HTML and mapping it onto a 2-dimensional canvas. You could, for example, express that you want all your H1 elements enclosed in a red border of 2mm wide, and in the Univers font at 24 pt, or Helvetica if Univers is not available. The next step would be to provide alternatives for different media: you might want H1 to be underlined on a black & white screen, and spoken by a female voice when rendered on a speech synthesizer. See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Style/ Bert -- Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/ http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/People/Bos/ INRIA/W3C bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93 +33 93 65 77 71 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Tuesday, 9 April 1996 13:41:03 UTC