Re: Relative weight - reader vs. author styles

Chris Josephs wrote:
> There are two possibilities.....

And a third. The UA can offer either option you describe for users to
specify default styling. By default, the UA treats this styling as
having no precedence over any author-specified styling, including
styling specified with tags such as BGCOLOR or FONT. However, a
'Default style' toggle will turn off all other stylesheets, ignore
inline style declarations, and apply the UA default style with full
precedence.

In addition to this default styling (and tucked away somewhere casual
users don't have to deal with it) is an option to load an external user
stylesheet. This user stylesheet would be applied to all documents in
conformance with the CSS1 spec. It would be distinct from the
user-specified defaults and by default would take precedence. But the
user would still have the option to toggle the defaults to full
precedence.

Basic argument:

A 'default user stylesheet' will not substitute for user-specified UA
defaults, since the user's style declarations will take precedence over
an author's styling tags such as BGCOLOR and FONT. Therefore, keep user
stylesheets distinct from UA defaults and consider the UA defaults as a
special kind of stylesheet that can have either no precedence or
complete precedence. When the UA defaults have complete precedence, all
other CSS styling is ignored.

> Needless to say I'd prefer the second option since it also could be
> useful for creation of a stylesheet when I am viewing a site that I
am
> authoring.  Later I could take the created stylesheet and import it
into
> the web site just by FTPing the CSS file.

Hmm. I can see a simple way of doing a WYSIWYG stylesheet editor that
works in the browser window. But this has nothing to do with the CSS1
spec.

David Perrell

Received on Saturday, 16 November 1996 15:24:07 UTC