what is a non-presentational hint?

CSS2 defines special rules for the handling of "non-presentational
hints" in the cascade, in section 6.4.4. [1]  The corresponding
statement in section 3.2 of CSS1 referred to "stylistic HTML
attributes." [2]  Bug 45240 was recently filed against Mozilla claiming
that a user stylesheet should not be able to override the default
presentation of the B and I elements in a user stylesheet without
making the declaration !important, since those elements are
non-presentational hints.  By a strict interpretation of CSS2, this is
correct, but according to CSS1 it is clearly wrong.

This implies that there is an error in CSS2, either in 6.4.4 or in
Appendix B (Changes from CSS1).  I suggest that it be considered an
error in section 6.4.4, if only for the sake of backwards compatibility
with existing implementations.

I hope to see one error or the other listed in the errata soon.

-David

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/cascade.html#q12
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1#cascading-order
[3] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45240

L. David Baron        <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >
Rising Junior, Harvard                           Summer Intern, Netscape
dbaron@fas.harvard.edu                               dbaron@netscape.com

Received on Tuesday, 18 July 2000 19:44:05 UTC