Re: CSS 2.1 WD and non-CSS presentational hints

On Wednesday 14 August 2002 3:04 am, Coises wrote:
|  [Tue, 13 Aug 2002 10:32:31 -0700] Tantek Çelik:
|  >Reread that last sentence quoted from CSS 2.1 above:
|  >
|  > "Note that non-CSS presentational hints had a higher weight in CSS2."
|  >This means that <FONT> 'bgcolor' etc. have LESS weight in CSS2.1.
|  >
|  >This is a good thing.
|
|  I submit that the cascade rules (and, in fact, web standards in general)
|  are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.  Whether the change is a
|  "good thing" or a "bad thing" is determined by what it would accomplish.
|
|  In this case, the only thing I can see it would accomplish is to cause
| user style sheets to interact with "legacy" pages differently than with
| pages coded to contemporary standards.  The only possible interpretation of
| this as a "good thing" that I see is that you would choose to make users
| pawns in a campaign to "deprecate" older standards by making legacy pages
| display erratically.  Perhaps you would consider that an achievement; I
| would not.

I *would* consider this as an achievement.
Note that all browsers with significant market share (MS IE, Netscape/Mozilla, 
Konqueror, Opera) have both *standards* and *quirk* modes.
In *quirk* mode, browser make its best to render page how *author* suggested 
it should look like, and doesn't follow standards.

In *standards* mode, browser follows standards.
And here arrival of CSS 2.1 is a *good thing*. It clarifies many *unclear* 
things in existing (CSS1, CSS2) specifications.

Legacy pages would be displayed the same way as it were rendered before, 
unless they change <html> to HTML 4.0-Strict, XHTML 1.x or some other modern 
DTD.
At some moment (2-3 years from now?), authors would consider switching to 
XHTML/XML, and they *will* face the fact that pages need to be corrected. And 
CSS 2.1 helps here.

|
|  >This is what users/authors want (CSS _should_
|  >override legacy non-CSS presentational hints).
|
|  Author CSS overrides legacy non-CSS presentational hints in all existing
|  and proposed CSS specifications.  The proposed change has no effect on
|  authors using CSS to control presentation.
|
|  I question the assertion that users would want this.  Please explain why
|  a user would want or expect the effect of entries in a user style sheet
|  to depend on whether the author specified presentation using CSS or HTML.
|
|  >And this is what has been implemented.
|
|  Not in IE 5-6 for Windows (which, as far as I can tell, implement
|  the cascade rules from CSS2 correctly); and not in Opera for Windows
|  (which treats the user style sheet as if it were the first imported author
|  style sheet --- that's inconsistent with any CSS specification).  I don't
|  have experience with any other browsers, so I can't comment on them.

If you have ready self-explaining testcase, I can test it in Konqueror and 
Mozilla, and provide input to you.
May be, this will clarify a lot of things. :-)

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
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Received on Thursday, 15 August 2002 02:08:58 UTC