[CSS21] User Selectively Disabling Properties should be allowed

I assume the reason for adding this:

    6. The UA must allow the user to turn off the influence of author
       style sheets.

to the conformance requirements is that a user style sheet with
!important rules is not a good enough abstraction of this capability
because it would need an infinite number of rules in order to 
match the selectivity of any possible set of author rules.

However, this logic also applies to the common browser feature
of selectively disabling author font sizes.  Given that this is a
desirable feature (I have it on most of the time) and given that authors
increasingly demand that CSS implementations are complete and under
their control, I think that there should be an explicit statement that
a browser is compliant if its only reason for not obeying a property
is that the user has used such a feature to disable some properties in
author style sheets.

(If, instead, one wants to be explicit about which properties can
be selectively disabled, I'd like line-height to be lumped with
font-size.)

(Admittedly, even rule 6 above will cause problems for many sites!)

Received on Tuesday, 14 June 2005 21:48:34 UTC