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

David Seibert (seibert@hep.physics.mcgill.ca)
Fri, 8 Dec 1995 11:24:21 -0500 (EST)


On Fri, 8 Dec 1995, Hakon Lie wrote:

> lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk writes:
>
> > Could you elaborate exactly how that works? I don't see how the
> > readers style sheet can influence the presentation of an un-named
> > ad-hoc peice of stylesheet on an individual element.
>
> Incoming document:
>
> ..
> <P STYLE="text-decoration: underline">underlined text</P>
> ..
>
> The UA would display the paragraph underlined until someting like this
> is found in the reader's personal style sheet:
>
> P { text-decoration: none !important }
>
> To learn more about why and when rules override each other, see [1].
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/WD-css1-951123.html#cascading
>
> Regards,
>
> -h&kon
>
> Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
> http://www.w3.org/People/howcome howcome@w3.org

If an author uses unnamed styles in the body of their html, the difficult
part is not overriding the author's style, but knowing what to use in
place of it. The reader's UA can only override it by replacing it with
the default, so that the reader won't have any idea that the author
wanted a special style for that piece of text. If someone uses a style
often, and a reader wants to change the way that it is presented to him
without forcing it into the default presentation, he has no way to do
so. On the other hand, if the author names the style then the reader can
add that stylename to his own stylesheet (with weight "important" so that
it overrides the author's choice).

David

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