Re: [cssom] Drop support for alternative stylesheets?

On Thursday 2013-08-29 16:17 +0200, Simon Pieters wrote:
> In the context of this bug
> 
>    https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22479

The IRC discussion in that bug includes:

> [22:15] <Hixie_> i think it's very sad that we'd remove it, but it is a lot of complexity for something that virtually nobody uses  

I'd note that I think it's some complexity, but I'm not sure I'd
call it a lot.

There are some features where the complexity of the code in
implementations is about the same as the complexity of the spec
describing them.  There are others where the complexity of the
implementation is orders of magnitude greater than the complexity of
the spec (say, float positioning).

I think this is an example of the first group.


To the primary question:

I'm inclined to agree that browser-provided *UI* for changing
alternate style sheets is a failure, like it has been for font
sizes.  (For different reasons, though.  Default font sizes couldn't
be hooked up to existing user "make it bigger" gestures because the
platform was already designed in a way that making the default font
size bigger would only sometimes affect the page.  For alternate
style sheets, the problem is that there's a need for UI that's only
relevant on a small percentage of pages so it's hard to discover in
a UI that doesn't unreasonably interrupt the user.)

I'm a little less convinced that the entire mechanism is broken.
The APIs for changing between alternate style sheet sets could
certainly be used by sites to implement theme switching, and
user-configurable theming is reasonably common.  How does this
mechanism compare to the mechanisms sites use now in performance and
ease of use?  (Probably the mechanisms sites use today are better in
terms of network bandwidth usage, since I suspect they generally
don't download the styles for the themes that are not being used.)

-David

-- 
𝄞   L. David Baron                         http://dbaron.org/   𝄂
𝄢   Mozilla                          https://www.mozilla.org/   𝄂
             Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
             What I was walling in or walling out,
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