Re: CSS3: font-style

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Jean-Michel Leon wrote:

> I can see two reasons why someone would want to render some text with an
> italic font, or red color:
> 
> 1 - that what you want to have for this particular chunk of text,
> because you think it's neat.
> 2 - you want to emphasize that chunk of text, and you choose a different
> style.
> 
> In the first case, if the cascade happens to put all the surrounding
> text in red or italic, well maybe it won't be that nice after all, but
> so be it. That's what CSS does, and if you're not happy with it, use
> XSL...
> 
> In the second case, you loose your effect, but still, I don't see a
> difference between font-style and colors: if you've decided to emphasize
> a portion of text using red or italic, and the cascade happens to make
> the surrounding text also or italic red, then why should it be allowed
> that italic can be toggled back to normal, and why shouldn't is be
> allowed that 'red' be toggled back to the default color (whatever that
> means). 

In most cases, giving rules for the surrounding text will work. Yes, it is
still possible that the cascade will change it to something else. However,
as has been pointed out before, the author should not be expected to
create a style sheet which would produce sane results no matter how
bizarre the user style sheet - indeed !important makes this impossible.
Having said that, it is perfectly possible to create style sheets which
will work well with sensible user style sheets.

I still agree that toggles for italic and oblique styles would be a very
useful thing, particularly for those wishing to design "house" styles.
While it might be nice to be able to express concepts such as "redder",
this is probably not something that can be done in CSS without adding an
undesirable degree of complexity. Colours are somewhat unusual in the
complexity of language used to describe them, especially in relation to
one another - as much in human languages as in computer languages.

Tim Bagot

Received on Thursday, 27 May 1999 18:03:54 UTC