Re: style and browser defaults

At 2001-02-08T15:23-0800, Kyle VanderBeek wrote:-

> In the case of W3 "Recommendations", all link text becomes completely
> unreadable to me (my yellow link color on your white background color).
> If I have read the specifications correctly, this is the correct behaviour
> (allow unspecified attributes to "cascade" back to the user agent
> settings).  I don't believe there are any specifications that say what
> these default settings must be, so a "themed" set of colors is fully
> appropriate.

I haven't checked the details (and the Recommendations seem to use a
variety of different style sheets), but this does seem to be broadly true
of a small, non-scientific random sample of Recommendations.

> The solution is, of course, to be explicit about colors that may interact
> (simply: "If you override one color, you should override them all").  In
> this case, the stylesheet should specify the A:link set of pseudo-classes
> since link text will be on top of the specified background.  Failing to do
> so produces unpredicable results in the user agent.

Indeed. Surprisingly, both <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/> and
<http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/> have style sheets which set color but not
background for some selectors, or vice versa. The latter even claims to
have been through the CSS validator, which gives warnings about just this,
IIRC. [I was going to verify this, but it seems to throw a
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException at me for any www.w3.org URL.]


Tim Bagot

Received on Thursday, 8 February 2001 19:19:49 UTC