Re: [CSS21] response to issue 115 (and 44)

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004 05:17:51 +0100, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>  
wrote:

..

> I see however no reason why CSS should have different rules than all
> those other document formats and especially not insanely complicated
> ever changing ones as the rules discussed above and proposals for CSS
> Level 3 suggest. Maybe mainstream browser developers have the necessary
> resources and expertise to understand and implement it, Tim Tool
> Developer has not. He should not be required to. No one should.

Joe Web Designer just uses his local Windows copy to create a style sheet,  
and adds some comments in his own language, adds his name, maybe adds a  
copyright symbol, saves his file in the local windows charset and uploads  
without thinking much. Most of the time he is lucky, and the server is  
smart enough to send .css files as text/css. Chris Lilley mentioned that  
those using text/* should know about encoding and otherwise it is just  
their fault is something goes wrong, but that is not very realistic. It  
works for HTML, after all. For HTML, if he does something wrong, a few  
funny characters show up in the text. This happens all the time. With CSS,  
you want to punish him by assuming UTF-8, which will garantee lots of  
stylesheets will not be applied.

The @charset rule we are now encouraged to use is exotic looking for most  
web designers, it doesn't appear in most of the how-to-use-CSS books or  
web-tutorials they have read so far. And they might even be afraid that  
adding it would break some browser.. And those are the same web designers  
who are now starting to use CSS-based designs, have mastered (or just  
copied) the Tantek hack etc.

So IMHO using heuristics even in Strict rendering mode makes sense.

-- 
The Web is a procrastination apparatus:    |  Rijk van Geijtenbeek
It can absorb as much time as              |   Documentation & QA
is required to ensure that you             |   Opera Software ASA
won't get any real work done.  - J.Nielsen |  mailto:rijk@opera.com M

Received on Friday, 20 February 2004 04:13:09 UTC