Re: BGSOUND, no need for it

  From: Stephanos Piperoglou <stephanos@trillian.hol.gr>
| 
| One question, slightly relevant:
| 
| 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?
---

Back when the STYLE attribute was a hot topic, there was some discussion
of whether and how to type-tag the STYLE attribute.  The issue sort of
got lost in the fuss over whether the attribute should exist at all.

Nobody offered very convincing reasons, at the time, why an author would
want to use two different STYLE notations inside a single document (the
need for being able to refer to different notations in separate external
stylesheets is more obvious).  Lacking such reasons, many of us thought
that there was no obvious need to type-tag the attribute - it could just
default to the type of the STYLE element.

You raise, on the other hand, a more cconvincing justification.  It
*does* seem reasonable that you might want to have multiple notations to
cover different domains (such as audio vs visual styling).  So maybe the
W3C should revisit this in specifying the STYLE attribute.  Two obvious
notations that come to mind would be to either provide a STYLE-TYPE
attribute that could be used along with the STYLE attribute or to
allow a delimited prefix containing the type within the STYLE attribute
value (e.g., STYLE="[text/ass]onMouseOver: speak-text(whisper)").  In
either case, the assumption would be that the default went with the
STYLE element.

scott

--
scott preece
motorola/mcg urbana design center	1101 e. university, urbana, il   61801
phone:	217-384-8589			  fax:	217-384-8550
internet mail:	preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com

Received on Wednesday, 28 August 1996 09:29:15 UTC