Re: Relative weight - reader vs. author styles

> What is a "user's stylesheet" if not simply the styling the user wants
> applied to bare-bones HTML pages? I can set background color in NSN or
> MSIE and it stays in effect until an author overrides it with a <BODY
> BGCOLOR=xxx> tag. Why should the situation change with client-side
> style sheets? IMO, users' style sheet should take _no_ precedence by
> default (superceded even by HTML tags). If an illegible page is
> encountered -- styled or not -- users should be able to toggle their
> stylesheet to _maximum_ precedence so as to override an author's tag
> attributes as well as style settings.
> 

I think the idea is that what you consider UA defaults such as typeface,
link color, bg color, etc will be totally replaced by the User Definable
Style Sheet.  Thus, they can change all of those options plus margins,
etc, etc (those who use Mosaic are probably already used to being able to
set a lot of these options by default).



> I don't understand how things could work otherwise. Is the user going
> to be expected to set UA display options AND a separate stylesheet that
> only gets used with author-styled documents? Are documents styled with
> tag attributes going to get blitzed when a user has a stylesheet in
> effect? What happens to a mixed document -- with some styling in tags
> and some in a stylesheet -- when the user's stylesheet takes precedence
> over the tags?
> 

Consider this... whether the stylesheet is from the user or the author, it
is still a stylesheet and the user agent should follow the CSS spec
concerning how a tag with inline styles will be affected by the cascading
order.

> The user's stylesheet should be a subset of the UA's display options, 
> and precedence should be toggleable from none to maximum.

I'm not really sure how far the spec goes into this, but I would guess
that the user agent would in the end allow the user to turn off or on
various style sheets whether they're embedded in the tags, in the
document, externally linked, or a sheet the user created.  No matter what,
I doubt that we could ever enforce a style on a user viewing a document,
despite usage of "legal" or "important".  More to the point, why would we?
As long as the document's being read by a user that's all that should
matter in the end.

> David Perrell

--- Christopher Josephes -------------------------
mailto:cpj1@visi.com               Vector Internet
http://www.visi.com/~cpj1

Received on Friday, 15 November 1996 22:48:44 UTC