Re: [CSS21] body { padding: 8px; } HTML40 sample stylesheet

On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Afternoon wrote:

> > Besides, why _should_ they be alike?
>
> So that two people, without user styles, looking at a styled page see
> the same page to the greatest extent.

And this is desirable exactly why? What's the point of using different
browsers if they need to do just the same?

But this raises the question whether the sample style sheets are really
meant to serve uniformity - which, combined with the idea of just
describing what browsers actually do, would mean that browsers should keep
imitating the default presentation style of old browsers. Canonicalizing
Mosaic, so to say. There's quite a lot in the "traditional" rendering that
reflects rather random and ill-advised decisions, like "Mosaic paragraphs"
with gaps between, equal spacing before and after a heading, and bullets
as list markers as opposite to the dashes of typography.

I had always though that the sample style sheets aimed, to some extent at
least, at _good default rendering_ in browsers. Similarity of rendering
would be a side effect, not the goal. But I'm afraid I have been even more
naive than I thought.


-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Thursday, 24 July 2003 18:10:22 UTC