Re: Optional Style Rules (@option proposal)

* Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>   In the past, there have been several suggestions for supporting 
>alternate and/or preferred style sheet mechanisms within CSS, using 
>rules such as @alternate and @preferred (or anything equivalent).  The 
>most recent of which I found was the thread started by William 
>Birchenough [1].
>
>   However, there are some limitations with the alterate/preferred 
>stylesheet mechanisms that I will address here.

Indeed. What I would rather see than syntax proposals is a compilation
of desired properties of such a mechanism to derive requirements to both
design solutions and measure solutions. As you point out, modular
composition of a site style sheet is such a property. Persistence is
another, how to maintain the style sheet selecion/composition throughout
a site, how to override it for specific parts of a site, how to maintain
state across browser sessions, etc. The possibility of incorporating the
selection into the document user interface like the serif/sans-serif
selection on <http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/> is one more concern, you
might even want a "preferences" page to let the user choose fonts,
colors, backgrounds, where the navbar goes. And so is linking, how to
say try <http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/> with the "Blue shadows" style via
an IRI Reference for example. Hence, what properties do we desire and
how important are they?

Received on Saturday, 1 May 2004 18:43:41 UTC