Re: CSS1, new draft specification

Chris Wilson says

> I don't like the disappearance of the $CANVAS.  Saying that "In HTML, the 
> BODY element is given this role" (of acting as the container for all 
> elements) falls down when you think about the effects of the default 
> stylesheet on HTML 2.0 documents that do not have a <BODY> (or a <HEAD>, or 
> an <HTML>). 

All valid HTML 2.0 documents have a body element. For example:

 cguhpb [37]: more bodytest.html
 <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
 <title>foo</title>
 hello.

 cguhpb [38]: html-check bodytest.html
 titletest.html ...
 ... valid

They may not, as noted, actually contain <BODY> or <HEAD> or <HTML> *tags*
but if the DTD was designed to allow them to be omitted then that is fine.
So, given that all HTML documents contain a body, and given that
the HTML 3 draft (which allowed multiple BODY elements) is currently 
expired, there is no problem with using style information on BODY in 
this manner.

> Following this mechanism, I could for example only set the 
> background color for documents which had a <BODY>.

Not so.

> I vote to keep the $CANVAS notation from the last draft.

Perhaps, but what does it do that BODY does not? What additional 
functionality does it provide?

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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Received on Tuesday, 2 January 1996 11:09:48 UTC