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.)

I agree. Konqueror already did the same and defined <B> as above in the UA 
style sheet. It's mainly the <font> tag and a few other cases that couldn't 
be implemented that way. So the rules for <font color=red> and <B> got 
applied at different places, one before and one after the user style sheet. 

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

I see your point :)

I'll happily change all presentational hints to go to the same level as the UA 
style sheet in konqueror if this becomes a recommondation (as it makes some 
things easier anyway...)

Cheers,
Lars

Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 12:19:14 UTC