Re: draft-ietf-html-style-00.txt & class as a general selector

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Fri, 8 Dec 1995 12:36:03 +0000 (GMT)

Paul Prescod says:

> At 03:42 PM 12/7/95 -0600, Scott E. Preece wrote:
> >Nonsense. It is *less* readable. When you read the text for the
> >indicated paragraph you have *NO IDEA* that there is styling magic
> >affecting it somewhere else, unless you have memorized the STYLE element
> >or refer to it for each paragraph you read.
>
> That is _exactly_ the point. If the paragraph is stylistically affected for
> some _reason_ then you should use the CLASS attribute. If it is
> stylistically affected for NO reason, then you can use either the STYLE or
> ID attributes.
>
> If it is affected for no reason, then you don't really care whether a user
> reading the document can figure your reasoning out.

If it is affected for no reason .... then why on earth should HTML be extended
to cope with formatting changes that occur for no reason?

Lets be clear here: a change to HTML hs been proposed so it can
do *ransom notes* ? Given the goals of HTML this is clearly nonsense.

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
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