Arena's experimental <STYLE>

can do weird

things to your screen

It's not quite like WiReD's layout yet, and it will probably never get there. But, we believe the appearance of the web -- whether you are reading it, seeing it or hearing it -- could be improved by allowing users, authors and publishers to supply presentation hints to go with the documents.

Also, we believe these hints should not be put into HTML directly, but rather in a style sheet. A new header tag, <style> is being proposed for HTML3, and Arena 0.96 uses is to implement an experimental style sheet mechanism. By looking at the source of this document, you will see simple style statements that creates the appearance of this page.

See the faq for a description of how Arena 0.96 implements cascading style sheets.

The initial style sheet implementation will give you an indication of what sort of functionality we want style sheets to have and how to express it. But, it's far from being complete.

One missing bit is e.g. the ability to set presentation parameters for a single element. That's why this paragraph had to be tag-abused into an address field in order to give it a radical appearance.

In a few releases from now, perhaps the style sheet notation will look like this:

# set font family for H2 and H4
H[24]: font.family = futura    

# all normal paragraphs following a headline will be given font
# size 14pt

H*,P: font.size = 14pt         

# the third level of ordered lists should be numberd using roman
# numerals

OL(OL(OL: numbering = roman    

# empahsised sections within an address should be colored red

ADDRESS(EM: text.color = red

# the document's left margin should be one tenth of the window width,
# but no less than 2em and no more than 10em

doc: margin.left  = 2em < WIDTH/10 < 10em 

# make document background white when new, interpolate color linearly
# until "faded-yellow" is reached after two days

doc.background: white < (AGE/2d) < faded-yellow

But -- if better ideas surface -- it could look very different, so don't base anything on what you see here. If you have ideas, let us know. Before you do so, however, you may want to take a look at the other references to HTML style sheets.

Have fun!


howcome