Re: Suggestion: Property for inheritance prevention

Jens Meiert writes:

> Special situation: I now integrated an external document (using an own
> stylesheet) by embedding its structure in a layer, whose ID here is 'foo'; its
> stylesheet is again referenced externally and I only added the ID selector to it
> to get a contextual selector in combination with each element.

I think this is not the best approach to include one document in
another (although it might be necessary for now to get the exact
effect you want). If you put two things in the same file, you indicate
that they share some context: same URL, same style, same scripts, same
metadata... If you want the two things to keep an individual identity,
they should remain in two files. You can then "transclude" one in the
other, e.g., with OBJECT in HTML. That also allows you to combine
things of different nature, such as HTML with PNG, SVG with MathML,
SMIL with Ogg, etc.

Of course, that then leads to the opposite question: sometimes you
want to transclude something, such as a quotation or a graph, but
still want it to blend in with its new context somewhat, by at least
partially inheriting a style sheet. E.g, if you include an SVG diagram
in HTML, you might want the colors and fonts of the diagram to match
those of the surrounding text.

That's part of a general question about the DOM of compound documents
(inheriting style sheets, passing focus or mouse clicks, etc.) and the
security questions that brings with it. There is some belief that this
is an issue that merits a separate working group, rather than
something that CSS, DOM, XLink, etc., should solve on their own. But
so far little has been done.

So, in summary, I'd prefer not to work on how to treat parts of one
file as separate documents, but rather on how to treat separate files
as one, compound document.



Bert
-- 
  Bert Bos                                ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/
  http://www.w3.org/people/bos/                              W3C/ERCIM
  bert@w3.org                             2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
  +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92            06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Wednesday, 22 October 2003 08:09:03 UTC