Re: CSS1 and tables

Chris Wilson:
>ship product - and we call each other on the phone, and make a blood
>pact to forget legacies and both follow the same very strict DTD (stop
>laughing, darn you!).
>
>Would we be able to convince everyone to upgrade?


With appropriate hype, certainly. Have you never seen crowds flock to the
site of a miracle? (~:

>I'll keep it in mind for IE 5.0 to see if we can truly move this into a
>default stylesheet, and then you can make that decision yourself as a
>user.

Ah, but that's not the same as IE-standard defaults, which affect the
authoring process. I'm not really all that hot for controlling defaults. I
argue that 'default stylesheets' should be as bare-bones as possible, and
that sizing should all be relative to a single default value, so that
overall readability can be enhanced by simply setting a font-size for BODY.
I can't see the point in having the browser retain control of font-size in a
table. In my experience, an author who wants to size type differently in a
table will want to specify that size anyway. And they may want to do this in
a relative fashion -- with em or percent measurements. Since the default
font-size value could be in any of TABLE, TR, or TD and TH, an author will
have to declare font-size for all of these to insure their table content
will be sized relative to the table's parent.

On the other hand, maybe this lame legacy support is a good thing.
Stylesheet authors probably shouldn't make any assumptions about default
stylesheets, and this situation shows why. Don't take chances with CSS and
taxes. Declare everything.

David Perrell

Received on Tuesday, 7 October 1997 18:07:51 UTC