Re: Issue 1: Font-weight and headings

(I wrote ealier, "David Perell wrote."  Sorry to misspell "Perrell.")
David Perrell wrote:
>>Reader/default style declarations are not overcome by inheritance, only
>>by contrary declarations.

I replied:
>So, that seems to be the problem -- the engineers at Netscape
>missed the same thing that I missed: inherited values don't
>outweigh initial/default UA style sheet values.

Checking back at the spec [1], Section 3.2 Cascading Order says:

1.Find all declarations that apply to the element/property in question.
  Declarations apply if the selector matches the element in question.
  If no declarations apply, the inherited value is used. If there is no
  inherited value (this is the case for the 'HTML' element and for
  properties that do not inherit), the initial value is used.

I agree with David -- to me, this rule supports IE's interpretation
that initial values should outweigh inheritence.

But it all hinges on how one interprets "If no declarations apply."
I suppose elements like H1 have an initial value, which is a
declaration.  But Navigator doesn't use a default style sheet, so
perhaps that's their justification for treating inheritence
as overriding the UA initial values -- they don't have any initial
declarations to override.

In Netscape's "Known CSS Issues" document [2], they list:
* The background property inherits into text elements.  Apply
  background-color : transparent if you do not want
  inheritance to occur.

This is the only mention they make of inheritence issues; and
the correction here is because background shouldn't be inherited.

Sure is strange.  Is anyone aware of any contact at Netscape
who is working to resolve style sheet issues like these?

[1] http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-CSS1#cascading-order
[2] http://developer.netscape.com/support/bugs/known/css.html
-- 
E. Stephen Mack <estephen@emf.net>    http://www.emf.net/~estephen/

Received on Sunday, 27 July 1997 06:15:05 UTC