Re: Relative weight - reader vs. author styles

Chris Josephs wrote:
> 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...

That's the way I saw it at first. But most users are not going to learn
CSS and will not want to deal with 'weight'. Whether you call it a
'user stylesheet' or 'user-specified UA defaults', I think most users
would welcome a choice of either 'none' or 'complete' precedence of
their styling choices over the author's. Since this is not in accord
with the CSS1 spec, then we can't call user-specified UA defaults that
work this way a 'user stylesheet'.

> 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.

So maybe user stylesheet and UA defaults should not be the same thing.
Maybe there should be an option to load a user stylesheet that works
according to the precedence in the CSS1 spec. Seems to me the most
sensible use of user stylesheets would be in a corporate intranet where
certain screens could be given a different look by overriding _known
values_. The user would still have the option of overriding everything
-- including the user stylesheet -- with the UA defaults.

So... two possible toggles on a UA button bar: 'Default style' and
'User stylesheet'. The 'User stylesheet' toggle would only appear if a
user stylesheet is loaded, and 'Default style' would override 'User
stylesheet'.

With this much control, few users would block an author's style without
first giving it a look. And yet the user would still have final control
over appearance.

David Perrell

Received on Saturday, 16 November 1996 13:32:43 UTC