Re: Issue 1: Font-weight and headings

Todd Fahrner <fahrner@pobox.com> wrote:
> [...] So what do y'all say we harness some of the smarts and
> energy here to produce an exhaustively-specified "default"
> stylesheet for all HTML 4 elements? [...]

> If not us, who?

Microsoft?

Seriously, IE 4.0 pp2 must have its default style sheet
embedded *somewhere* within it.  It's clear that IE's initial
values are outweighing inheritance, so these initial values
must be codified in an internal style sheet format somehow.
If this can be made available, then it will save us all the effort.

I agree with Todd that:
> Prudent CSS authors, hoping to avoid damaging interactions with user
> style sheets, can link to this sheet (@import) as a base. It will be
> easier and better to edit this sheet than to create new ones from
> scratch, complicating them incrementally as HTML content grows.

There will be some speed and compatibility issues to consider,
and it will be difficult to create a default style sheet that
works for IE 3.x and 4.x and Navigator 4.x.  It's probably
worthwhile to ignore the various preview releases; it may
also be worth waiting until IE 4.0 is released.

The first issue that will be problematic is specifying a default
font size -- what units?  What face?  Perhaps this is one area
where we shouldn't have our "default" stylesheet make a declaration.

If it's impossible to get one universal working style sheet,
then we'll have to resort to different versions and the use of
Todd's infamous script.

(Perhaps we can get the "default" style sheet to be stored at W3C
along with some other accepted "library" styles?)
-- 
E. Stephen Mack <estephen@emf.net>    http://www.emf.net/~estephen/

Received on Sunday, 27 July 1997 19:00:27 UTC