> There needs to be a way to tell the browser, "only apply attribute X if
> you can apply attribute Y too." Otherwise we'll run into situations where
> documents will be unreadable because a particular browser (perhaps due to
> platform limitations) can only present half the style hints, and the half
> that *are* presented don't make sense without the others.
>
> For example, I was playing around with style sheets in Arena 0.97 and
> tried to put a background image in my document as described in the draft
> spec. "back.image" doesn't seem to be implemented yet. Unfortunately,
> font.color is, and my colors assumed that the background image would be
> loaded.
In this particular case, you should specify a background
color that contrasts with your foreground color as well
for the browsers that don't understand background images.
> [ ... ]
> Where we allow an additional name to be assigned to a style element, and
> allow other style elements to depend on the success of the first one. Sort
> of a dependency tree, if you will, which I think is an appropriate way to
> think about this problem.
I think the specification language should be kept as
simple as possible. If it's too complex, no two browsers
will implement it the same way, and some may not bother
implementing stylesheets at all.
--Joe English