RE: User Style Sheets in PP2 (was Re: Issue 1: Font-weight and h eadings)

And we also allow you to always use only your own font faces, font
sizes, and colors (including backgrounds), outside of CSS, because I too
long ago reached the conclusion that CSS is a poor accessibility
solution.

	-Chris
Chris Wilson
cwilso@microsoft.com
***

> -----Original Message-----
> From:	Paul Prescod [SMTP:papresco@technologist.com]
> Sent:	Tuesday, July 29, 1997 7:38 AM
> To:	www-style@w3.org
> Subject:	Re: User Style Sheets in PP2 (was Re: Issue 1:
> Font-weight and  headings)
> 
> E. Stephen Mack wrote:
> > 
> > I wrote:
> > >> And I can have an ! important declaration
> > >> in my own user style sheet that will save me from seeing it
> > >> when I'm viewing on-screen (I prefer Verdana now).
> > 
> > Paul Prescod asked me:
> > >How would you do that?
> > 
> > IE 4.0 pp2 allows user style sheets. Create a style sheet file
> > (such as mystyle.css) and put in it whatever rules you want,
> > such as
> >     BODY { font-family: verdana ! important; }
> 
> That will stop you from seeing Times, or whatever other font you
> hated.
> It won't affect explicitly set titles, paragraphs, spans or classes
> (with or without ! important).
>  
> > Hopes sink.  Fiddle with some menus a bit, but then realize you've
> > made a mistake in your style sheet (D'oh, I meant font-family, not
> > font-style.  I need a KGV for style sheets baaaaad...)  Exit from
> > IE, rerun it again, reload the simple document.  Success!  Verdana.
> > No more will hideous fonts like Times darken my screen.  This is
> > almost as good as when Mosaic came out and let me customize
> > fonts.  
> 
> Exactly. Except Mosaic, could, in principle, have an option that said:
> "Don't ever show me Times, *ever*" and that option would stick, no
> matter what the author wanted. You can't say that with CSS. More
> important, you can't say: "I can't distinguish blues from
> greens...don't
> use those colors to distinguish meaning." Again, old fashioned browser
> options could, in principle, do that, if only by knocking everything
> back to black and white. CSS can't do this explicitly or by knocking
> things back to black and white.
> 
> Any UA vendor who depends on CSS to do things it cannot do, like this,
> is robbing their user. They need to go back to putting in old
> fashioned
> .X-preferences, .ini items to do these sorts of things.
> 
> > Marvel at the wondrousness.
> 
> Huh? You've just admitted that the feature isn't new. Mosaic provided
> it. And I've now pointed out that it doesn't accomplish what you said
> it
> would. There is no reader/author balance. The author knows what
> elements
> and classes she is going to use, and you do not. Thus she has all of
> the
> power unless you are going to rewrite your browser stylesheet for each
> document. They only way to restore that balance is to allow the user's
> stylesheet to work on the *result* of the formatting operation. You
> must
> be able to map blue to grey, Times to Verdana, small fonts to large
> fonts -- but that would be a very different language from CSS.
>  
>  Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 1997 11:06:39 UTC