Style-sheets (was: I come not to praise HTML...)

From: Dan Fabulich (daniel.fabulich@yale.edu)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 13:38:06 MST


'What is your name?' 'Harvey Newstrom.' 'Do you deny having written the
following?':

> As I pointed out in another post, this already exists. It is called
> style-sheets. It sounds exactly like what you want. You can read a
> newspaper page with the "small-type/columns" style sheet, while reading a
> humor page with "comic-book font and large drop caps" style sheet. It would
> be trivial to switch them without altering the source content pages. Users
> can override the author's style sheet with one of their own, such as
> "large-print" style sheet, or "voice synthesizer for the blind" style sheet.

Only trouble with them is that they are ill-supported in the big two
browsers. Internet Explorer 3 and Netscape 4 have seriously flawed
implementations (that's right, the current LATEST VERSION of Netscape
doesn't support them well!) and Internet Explorer 4 and 5, while they do
have passable implementations, have flat out holes in their support.

> Any web designer who doesn't know about them is simply nonstandard and
> out-of-touch.

Or else that web designer doesn't want to learn a new language which can,
at present, only be viewed correctly on Opera. No sane web developer
would extensively employ style sheets at this time. No one can read them.

-Dan

      -unless you love someone-
    -nothing else makes any sense-
           e.e. cummings



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