Re: what is a non-presentational hint?

L. David Baron wrote:
> 
> 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.

CSS2 is wrong I believe, as I suggested in a (relatively) recent (can't
find it, sorry) message (in suggesting that *elements* can be mapped -
it can only be attributes that are mapped; it breaks fundamentally the
idea of CSS as a way to create stylistic effects from content-neutral
building blocks - B should be ELEMENT {font-style: bold} in the UA style
sheet; if it is not one is required to introduce a 'bold' element in the
abstract, and independent of CSS, which is absurd). I don't think this
is a deliberate change, more a (misguided IMO) desire not to reuse old
prose.

-----------------------------------
Please visit http://RichInStyle.com. Featuring:
MySite: customizable styles.         AlwaysWork style 
Browser bug table covering all CSS2 with links to descriptions.
Lists of > 1000 browser bugs         Websafe Colorizer 
CSS2, CSS1 and HTML4 tutorials.      CSS masterclass 
CSS2 test suite: 5000++ tests and 300+ test pages.

Received on Wednesday, 19 July 2000 05:16:49 UTC