Re: CSS 2.1 WD and non-CSS presentational hints

On Tuesday 2002-08-13 06:41 -0400, Lars Knoll wrote:
> But I think most browsers currently allowing user style sheets behave 
> differently (correct me if I'm wrong with this assumption) and I thought one 
> goal of CSS 2.1 was also to approach common practice.

The problem with the rule stated in CSS2 is that the difference between
presentational hints and things that go in the UA stylesheet is not
clear.  For example, is the B element in HTML a presentational hint, or
is it something that should be styled in the UA stylesheet by a rule

B { font-weight: bold; }

This change makes this distinction irrelevant.  This makes
implementation in Mozilla easier, since we no longer need to worry about
whether something is a presentational hint or a rule in the UA
stylesheet when we decide how we want to implement it.  (After all, with
CSS2 selectors, many presentational hints that are in attributes can be
implemented with rules in the UA stylesheet.  Then again, if B were
determined to be a presentational hint, we could just implement a second
UA stylesheet for presentational hints.)

The rule in CSS2 was, in my opinion, too poorly defined to be
interoperably implementable.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron        <URL: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~dbaron/ >

Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 09:22:17 UTC