Re: BGSOUND, no need for it

On Aug 28,  7:50am, Chris Josephes wrote:

> [Stephanos Piperoglou wrote]
> > I agree to the idea of sounds in a stylesheet, but not in CSS1. CSS has
been
> > designed to carry a DTP metaphor to HTML rendering. A different kind of
> > stylesheet that can be attached via the STYLE tag etc. (with a different
> > MIME type of course) is what is needed.

I see no need to invent a different syntax and a whole new stylesheet
language just to do non-visual rendering. I can confidently state that
CSS was not designed to be limited to what you call a "DTP metaphor".

> I'll agree halfway with this one.
> I think that audio settings could very well be done in CSS1 because it
> wouldn't hard presentation, structure, or normal parsing of the
> document.  True, CSS is mostly visual rendering right now, but there's
> nothing in the spec saying it is limited to layout control.

Right. Presentation on alternative or multiple media is within the scope
of CSS.

> On the other hand, there could always be a different stylesheet that
> comes around that may better handle situations for audio (or even a
> different stylesheet just for printed output).  I'd guess that which one
> to use was dependent on an author's needs.

Yes - different stylesheets can be specified for different media. These can
all use the same language, though. For example you might have:

-  a stylesheet which gives a very open layout with big bold headings and
   ample use of whitespace

- a second stylesheet which gives a very compact presentation to view a
  lot of information in a small space (for example as a reference while
  using most of your screen for a wordprocessor)

- a third stylesheet which handles purely auditory presentation via a
  speech synthesizer

- a fourth one with mixed visual and auditory presentation for use on
  a digital TV set-top box (trust me, you do not want to read pages of
  text off a TV screen).

> > The STYLE tag lets you specify content type so that the UA can know what
> > language the stylesheet is in. How come the STYLE *attribute* doesn't? What
> > if a browser supports DSSSL and CSS1 and something else as well? How does
it
> > distinguish which language the directives in a STYLE attribute are?

> I'd imagine that the useragent would have to determine manually which
> language was being used.  Otherwise, to specify CSS, you could have a
> simple <STYLE> container and specify a style for a tag that you don't
> even use.  (ok, maybe that's a stretch).

Or use an empty style container at the top of your document.

<style type="text/css"></style>

<p style="color: rgb(40% 75% 68%); margin-left: 35pt">Foo


-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 93 65 79 87            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 28 August 1996 09:22:29 UTC