- From: David Hyatt <hyatt@apple.com>
- Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 01:54:56 -0700
- To: Patrick Lauke <P.H.Lauke@salford.ac.uk>
- Cc: www-style@w3.org
On Sep 25, 2006, at 1:32 AM, Patrick Lauke wrote: > >> David Hyatt > > >> I'd say use a class attribute on your image links and spare yourself >> the lousy page performance of a parent selector. :) > ... >> it allows for simpler rule construction and much better performance. > > This argument can pretty much be made for *all* complex selectors. > nth child, only-of-type, etc. > Does that mean they should all be abandoned in favour of simply > putting the burden on document authors to properly class the stuff > they want styled a particular way? > I think many of these selectors are unnecessary, but I also have no real objection to implementing most of them (since for the most part they require very little code). >> I suppose you might counter that this kind of rule would be >> useful in >> a user stylesheet, but user stylesheets are only interesting to the >> 0.000001% of the browser user population that understand CSS well >> enough to construct and apply them. :) > > Don't confuse the usefulness of user stylesheets with the lousy, > propeller-head implementation of them. If browsers would offer a > system whereby user styles could be downloaded (from a repository > site, similar to what happens with Firefox themes/extensions), > added, activated, switched to, etc without requiring user to > actually know CSS itself, I'd posit that uptake would be a lot > higher. Don't provide inadequate solutions and then moan that users > aren't taking advantage of them... Yes, point taken, but even if you (hypothetically) had a user- friendly mechanism for supplying user styles, the set of useful global rules in a user stylesheet would be extremely limited. The reason being that any global rules that do anything more than very minor tweaks to styles will cause dramatic site misrenderings when applied to the Web at large. I maintain that the cited use case is not really interesting in a user stylesheet context because it doesn't really have global application. As I've said a couple of times before, my real objections to a parent selector are (a) I don't like selectors that are incompatible with incremental rendering (since you risk displaying incorrectly styled content when doing incremental rendering while a page loads). (This problem would be especially bad for parent selectors... moreso than say, :last-child). and (b) The performance of this selector would be terrible. dave (hyatt@apple.com)
Received on Monday, 25 September 2006 08:55:13 UTC