Re: CSS 2.1 WD and non-CSS presentational hints

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Stuart Ballard wrote:
>
> By the way, an interesting implementation approach to provide the CSS2
> cascade based on this definition of "non-CSS presentational hint",
> while still using the UA stylesheet to define their rendering, would
> be for an implementation to give "!important" rules in the UA
> stylesheet this level of precedence.

At least once UA is already using !important UA rules to mean "highest
level possible" (i.e., even overriding user !important). This is useful
for preventing certain things from being overriden, e.g. styles on
<input type="file"> or the styles of internal pseudo-elements.


> Thus a snippet of a UA stylesheet might look like this:
> b { font-weight: bold !important }
> strong { font-weight: bold }

why should a user not be able to override the default rendering of <b> but
should be allowed to override the default rendering of <strong>? That
makes no sense to me.


> I think everyone has agreed that the proposed CSS2.1 modification to 
> this cascade (which would swap #4 with #5) is a bad idea because it 
> makes it impossible for a user to place a rule at a level of precedence 
> lying between #4 and #6, which is a useful thing to be able to do. Am I 
> right that this is the consensus?

No, unless I'm not part of the group claiming consensus. :-)

I don't understand why I would want to override the default UA rendering
of <strong>, but not the default UA rendering of <font color="obnoxious">.
In fact, I imagine I would want to override <font> a lot _more_ than I
would want to override <strong>.

-- 
Ian Hickson                                      )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
"meow"                                          /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
http://index.hixie.ch/                         `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Saturday, 31 August 2002 14:24:50 UTC