- From: Stuart Ballard <sballard@NetReach.Net>
- Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 15:52:27 -0400
- To: bert.bos@sophia.inria.fr
- CC: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>, www-style@w3.org, frederick.boland@nist.gov
Bert Bos wrote: > > Good question. Since XHTML (at least from 2.0 onwards) is supposed to > be an examplary XML-based format, with as little semantics as possible > that is not derived from other specifications (CSS, XLink, etc.), and > since XHTML doesn't have a BGCOLOR attribute anyway, I guess we can > remove the special treatment of BODY in the case of XHTML. By the same logic, you might also want to remove the semantics of <head> versus <body> altogether in favor of just setting display:none on all the elements that traditionally live in <head>. The head element (as I understand it) is supposed to contain meta-information about the document, while the body contains absolutely everything that might ever possibly be rendered. By this logic, it *is* reasonable to put style characteristics on <body> rather than <head>. If you're going to put the style characteristics on <html>, then you're implicitly saying "the html element is part of what gets rendered", and contradicting the original semantics "the body is the only part that gets rendered". Once you've done that, there's no purpose to having <body> at all, and <head> is there to "exclude" stuff from being rendered, if at all. I don't necessarily think <body> should be deprecated, but I do think it's inconsistent to keep it around if it isn't going to act as the root of what really gets rendered. If it is, on the other hand, the recommendation to use it for specifying background styles should stand. Stuart.
Received on Friday, 28 September 2001 15:52:52 UTC