Re: canvas <html> <body>

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jan Roland Eriksson" <jrexon@newsguy.com>
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Sent: Wednesday, May 01, 2002 2:34 AM
Subject: Re: canvas <html> <body>


> On Wed, 1 May 2002 06:00:58 -0700, you wrote:
>
> >How can a stylesheet determine which is the root, html or body ?
>
> A CSS stylesheet does not have to determine such a thing.

That's what I thought.

> One or more CSS stylesheet(s) "selects" an element and applies a
> (possibly) cascaded style result to that element. That elements
> "position" in the parse tree has very little to do with the final
> presentation, except for the effects of CSS defined inheritance.
>
> >When you say: if an element has not been styled. Do you mean by
> >that, that the element has not been mentioned in a stylesheet?
>
> Well, in popular speach, yes.
>
> >I thought that it would then take on the default css properties,
>
> It's supposed to, but browser vendors have no obligation to unite on
> what is supposed to be the "default" in such a case.

So I have understood correctly...

But I thought that XHTML was supposed to be just like any other XML format
that defines a set of tags, but how those tags are rendered is only
determined with a CSS stylesheet, and that any XML format (or at least those
having a structure resembling XHTML), for instance NITF could be used with a
CSS stylesheet. So I really don't feel my question's been answered yet. If
one wants to make a generic XML viewer with CSS capabilities, should one
then start displaying from the root (for example <html> in XHTML) element,
and set in the style sheet that <head> is display:none, same for script etc.
The viewer would then look at the display property on an element to
determine if it's a table/list etc. and not at the element name.

I thought that this was the direction that W3 was going for?

--
Sigurd Lerstad

Received on Wednesday, 1 May 2002 06:04:58 UTC