RE: Cursor: auto

David Baron wrote:
> > Matthew Brealey [mailto:thelawnet@yahoo.com] wrote:
> > >Incidentally, cursor: auto is superfluous (i.e., because of browser
> style
> > >sheets - e.g., P INPUT[text]).
> > 
> > Actually it's not, really - because you may wish to override another
> > stylesheet rule with a rule that tells the UA to use "the default".
> 
> This is an interesting value, since it basically says to go back and
> take the value that would have resulted from the cascade of the UA
> stylesheet only.  This means that the default cursors can't be
> implemented through a UA stylesheet (as would be possible otherwise).
I find the concept of auto odd because the association of cursor with
element MUST be made - the UA style sheet could do:

P {cursor: text}
INPUT[type=button] {....
, but it would still need to have hard-wired (which seems odd in view of
the importance of a UA style sheet - why have one and then make it wrong)
the associations for elements.

> 
> Perhaps a feature like this would be useful for other properties.
> Maybe there should be a value called 'unspecified' (or something) that
> would mean that the value would be unspecified at the given level of
> the cascade.  (It could be a valid value for every property, just like
> 'inherit'.)  It would then be treated as a value while resolving the
> order and specificity within each level (i.e., origin and weight) of
> the cascade, and if it were the "winning" value at the top level, the
> value at the next level down would be used.
> 
> There are other possible variants of such a property, but I don't see
> how they would be useful.

I had actually considered this before, inspired by a message someone sent
me regarding !important as being confusing with NOT important from a
programming perspective.

Although said in jest, I can see that this would be useful.
For example, if you want to say 'use this colour scheme if you've not got
your own', but if you have then use it.

E.g.,

BODY {color: black !notimportant;
background: white !notimportant}
Thus if the user had
BODY {color: green;
background: orange}, then their values would override.



=====
----------------------------------------------------------
From Matthew Brealey (http://members.tripod.co.uk/lawnet (for law)or http://members.tripod.co.uk/lawnet/WEBFRAME.HTM (for CSS))
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Received on Monday, 17 January 2000 07:23:51 UTC