RE: LINK'ed style sheets

That is an important question - I've thought about it a bit, and haven't
come up with any good solutions (barring an extra attribute on LINK, ha
ha).  However, given the complaining that's been going on about
embedding style in the STYLE block where it will show up in downlevel
browsers (and the assault from the SGML front on using <!-- --> to hide
significant content in HTML), I can't see making the only automatic
linking method be <STYLE>@import foo.css</STYLE>.  <LINK> is much
cleaner.

So, I don't have an obvious good solution for this.  IMO, for the
reasons stated above, making <LINK> manual-selection-only is not a good
option.  Three other options:
1) Add a new attribute to <LINK> to denote whether the stylesheet should
be automatically applied.  If left sufficiently general, the same
attribute could be used to tell a user agent to pre-load links (e.g.
<LINK REL=NEXT AUTO HREF=foo>).
2) Add a stylesheet-wide attribute to the CSS spec, which tells whether
the stylesheet should be automatically applied or not.
3) Add a second stylesheet value to the LINK REL attribute, e.g.
ALTSTYLESHEET, that would indicate stylesheets that should be presented
as alternatives, but not automatically applied.  I personally like this
one the best.

Comments?

	-Chris
Chris Wilson
cwilso@microsoft.com
-[-

>----------
>From: 	Hakon Lie[SMTP:howcome@w3.org]
>Sent: 	Tuesday, June 25, 1996 7:49 AM
>To: 	Chris Wilson (PSD)
>Cc: 	'www-style@w3.org'; 'mseaton@pobox.com'
>Subject: 	RE: LINK'ed style sheets
>
>Chris Wilson writes:
>
> > Planned implementation is, I believe, to apply <LINK>ed stylesheets
> > automatically, but allow the user to selectively turn them off. 
> > Comments on this plan are welcome.
>
>This has been an item of discussion in the past. The current CSS1
>specification reads:
>
>  The 'LINK' element references alternative style sheets that the
>reader
>  can select, while imported style sheets [in the STYLE element] are
>  automatically merged with the rest of the style sheet.
>
>I.e., the STYLE element gives the style sheets to be applied
>automatically, while the LINK element refers to style sheets that can
>be manually selected.
>
>This policy allows both additive style sheets (a.la.
>"green-headers.css" + "wide-margins.css" + "all-italics.css") and
>alternative style sheets (a.la. "for-printers.css" /
>"for-the-wired-generation.css" / "old-and-wise.css")
>
>So, going back to Chris plans: if you apply all LINKed style sheets
>automatically, how would you indicate alternative style sheets?
>
>Regards,
>
>-h&kon
>
>Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
>http://www.w3.org/people/howcome  howcome@w3.org
>

Received on Tuesday, 25 June 1996 12:26:36 UTC