Re: A possible presentational hints proposal for CSS 2.1

07.10.02 23:48:06, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>One compromise proposal we came to is given below. Before deciding whether
>we should use it or not, we are interested in what people here think of
>it, since discussion here was the main motivating factor regarding
>changing CSS 2.1.


> Example:
>
>    The following user stylesheet would override the font weight of
>    <b> elements in all documents, and the color of <font> elements
>    with color attributes in XML documents. It would not affect the
>    color of any <font> elements with color attributes in HTML
>    documents:
>
>       b { font-weight: normal; }
>       font[color] { color: orange; }


I think not displaying the b as font-weight: normal is a Bad Idea, and not 
making the font tag orange (assuming X11 support...) is a Bad Idea. 
Compromising with a Bad Idea is still a Bad Idea. That it also would involve 
a complex rule about which elements in which namespaces will adhere to this 
arbitrary rule does not make it any better.

The only consequence of this is that every author would have to append 
!important to every style rule to make the page behave sensibly. This is no 
help to a web author at all. Neither will that help any user. If it is 
paramount for a user that an HTML page never diverts from Appendix A it is 
trivial to make an overriding user style sheet.

You will not make future users of CSS happy with this rule (and only a 
handful present users).


Jonny Axelsson,
Documentation,
Opera Software

Received on Tuesday, 8 October 2002 11:54:28 UTC