---It's conventional, since sometimes people who don't read the list get involved.
--- | How about having the font substitution specified separately from the style | assignment? Like, just have a dedicated region in the style sheet for a | font substitution table. That way you can limit the number of font names to | 1 in the 'font' property without losing substitution ability. Besides, it | will make for much cleaner code, which is what style sheets are trying to | do for HTML in the first place, so let's do likewise for the style sheets | themselves.---So, you're suggesting adding something like:
fontmap {body: "Times New Roman" "Palatino" "Roman"; structural: "Lucida Bright Medium" "Helvetica" "sans"}
to define internal names that would be specified in font-family and font specifications:
H1 {font: 16/24 structural bold} P {font-family: body}
That seems like a good idea to me. It doesn mean that the stylesheet has to have a place and syntax for such specifications, which it doesn't seem to at the moment. I used the sytax of style rules above, for parsing convenience, but it might be better to add a separate struture to the stylesheet for information that applies across rules. This would also be where, for instance, you would specify that color names should be interpreted as CNS names or that the default for unscaled units should be picas.
An alternative is to add "=" as an operator and put this stuff in as pseudo-properties allowed only in the right hand sided of BODY rules:
BODY {fontmap: body= "Times New Roman" "Palatino" "Roman"; fontmap: structural: "Helvetica" "sans"; colormap: CNS}
scott
-- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550 internet mail: preece@urbana.mcd.mot.com