Various Niggling CSS1 Questions

In my crawling around through the CSS1 specification, I've come across a
few questions which I was hoping the Real Experts around here could help
clear up.  If these have been asked before and I missed it, tell me and
I'll go digging.

1. Should CSS1 implementations take the FONT tag into account?  For
example, if I set the rule "BODY {font: 12pt serif;}", then tags like <FONT
size="+2"> will have no visual effect-- everything will be 12pt serif.

2. On a related note, given the above CSS1 rule, all the browsers I've
tested will render every single heading level as 12pt serif text.  Is this
because that's what the specification calls for, or because the browsers
are inheriting things incorrectly, or is it a failing on the part of
browser authors to provide good internal style sheets with font-size values
like 'x-large'?

3. The specification says that vertical-align may get into "unsolvable
situations... where element dependencies form a loop."  I don't get it.
What does this mean, and can we have some examples?


And a couple of observations:

1. Why are the anchor pseudo-classes limited only to HREF anchors?  I'd
kind of like to be able to apply styles to NAME anchors without having to
create a class selector for them.  Something like "A:name {color: gray;}"
would work fine, it seems to me.

2. Let's say I set "BODY {color: blue;}".  In this case, obviously, all
foreground will be blue.  Including HRs, which will become unshaded blue
lines.  If I don't want this, I have to identify every block-level element
(at a minimum) in the document and group them into a rule which sets them
to blue, and eliminate the rule for BODY.  It would be much nicer to be
able to do something like this:

   BODY {color: blue;}
   HR {color: none;}

...or whatever-- substitute a more appropriate value keyword if you like.
Is this a reasonable idea?
   I think that's all for now.  Thanks in advance for insights, etc.

--
Eric A. Meyer  -  eam3@po.cwru.edu  -  http://www.cwru.edu/home/eam3.html
 Hypermedia Systems Manager
 Digital Media Services                http://www.cwru.edu/dms/dms.html
 Case Western Reserve University       http://www.cwru.edu/

Received on Monday, 22 September 1997 17:56:15 UTC