Re: Scoped style sheets.

On Jul 15, 2008, at 9:44 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 11:39 AM, Brad Kemper <brkemper@comcast.net>  
> wrote:
>
> On Jul 15, 2008, at 9:06 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>
>> Andrew Fedoniouk <news@terrainformatica.com> wrote:
>> I propose to drop that <style scoped> feature then.
>> As, it seems, no one have clear idea of their purpose.
>>
>> No...  Their purpose is quite clear, and has been explained in  
>> several ways by several people.  They allow you to create a set of  
>> styles which can only affect a subset of the document.
>
> That is already very easily done. This really seems more and more  
> like a solution in search of a problem.
>
> Yes, it's easy for a site author to create selectors which target a  
> section of a document.  It's currently impossible (without a CSS  
> parser/rewriter) to make a *set* of styles only target a section of  
> a document, especially when the styles aren't written by the  
> document author, but instead by end-users or middle-users (such as,  
> say, people on a social network styling their individual pages).
>
> In other words, it's intended to create a CSS sandbox, which is  
> extremely difficult to achieve with current methods.
>
> ~TJ

And is there really such a large hue and cry for such sandboxing of  
CSS? It seems like a very limited use case, one that can (and probably  
is) dealt with already by pre-processing the input before it is  
published, and prepending something like #sandbox to the beginning of  
each selector. There are many things I would much rather see the WG  
and implementors spend their precious time on.

Especially because, as an author who often has to add my own CSS file  
to HTML created by other companies, I do not want my hands tied via  
sandboxing, and generally it has never been an issue from those  
supplying the HTML. I have completely changed the look of their pages/ 
applications, and they had no problem with that.