HTML style sheets

H&kon W Lie (howcome@dxcern.cern.ch)
Thu, 3 Nov 1994 12:10:14 --100

Judging from the recent disussions in www-talk and at WWW'94 i
Chicago, I think the consenus on style sheets is growing. Several of
the people interested in these topics are not on the high-traffic
www-talk mailing list. I propose moving the discussion to www-html,
which is a smaller list with less activity. (To subscribe to www-talk,
send a message to www-html-request@info.cern.ch with "subscribe
www-html <your real name>" in the body.)

Also, I have created a style sheet page with references to relevant
information. The page is far from complete and contributions are
welcome. See:

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Style/

A brief summary of where we stand

Consensus items:

o Style sheets should provide a mapping between HTML elements and
presentation parameters
o Style sheets provide _hints_ that the browser may or may not take
into account when rendering documents
o Both the author and the user should be able to influence the final
presentation
o Style sheets should primarily be referenced from the HTML
documents, not embedded.

Items for discussion:

o Should style sheets be HTML-specific or SGML-generic?
o Can style sheets be blended?
o Should style sheets include logic?
o To what extent should the final presentation be predictable?
o What presentation parameters do we want to control?

Am I wrong? What's missing?

-h&kon

Hakon W Lie, WWW project, CERN, CH-1211 Geneva 23
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/People/howcome/