RE: LINK'ed style sheets -Reply

>>> Chris Wilson (PSD) <cwilso@microsoft.com> 06/25/96 08:27am >>>
>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.

This is an important point.  It's not a simple as one 
might think to deploy new browsers in a large organization. 
And many people simply would not know how to press the 
"apply style" button, if such a thing existed.

>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>).

What do you mean by "pre-load"?  Put it in cache for later 
linking?

>2) Add a stylesheet-wide attribute to the CSS spec, which tells
>whether the stylesheet should be automatically applied or not.

Wouldn't the browser then have to parse all linked style 
sheets to determine if they were to be automatically
applied?  I don't think I like that option.

>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.

This makes sense.  I know it's a matter of interface, 
but how would you let the user choose between styles?

The reason I ask is that I have co-workers here who have 
vision problems, and it would be cool if the style sheet 
that was automatically loaded was one that had everything 
in large fonts.

Like, say, she could adjust a setting in Internet explorer 
that would always download a "large" type style sheet. 
And everywhere she went on the web, she would see the colors
and whatever else that the author intended, but it would 
all be in a large font, without her having to select it
every time she went to a new site.

>Comments?
>	-Chris
>Chris Wilson cwilso@microsoft.com
>-[-

>>From: 	Hakon Lie[SMTP:howcome@w3.org]

<snip!>

>>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 13:15:31 UTC