Re: the STYLE attribute

Walter Ian Kaye (boo@best.com)
Sun, 12 Nov 1995 00:31:10 -0800

At 2:52p 11/10/95, Benjamin C. W. Sittler wrote:
>On Fri, 10 Nov 1995, Joe English wrote:
>> A STYLE attribute is not _necessarily_ a horrible idea, but
>> it's vital that a single style notation be standardized before
>> adding it to HTML.
>
>Not necessarily, so long as we stick to a STYLE element in HEAD with a
>NOTATION attribute, or to external stylesheets and content negotiation.
>On a purely experimental basis, I built Navipress and CSS stylesheets for
>one of my pages and used content negotiation very successfully to get the
>correct stylesheets for three different browsers. (The browsers were
>emacs w3-mode, Arena 0.97 and a Navipress beta.)

How about this:

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Walter's Styles Mini-Proposal</TITLE>
<STYLE NOTATION="x-wik" SRC="internal" PRIORITY=2>
<!-- style sheet embedded into document (only if src="internal") -->
(subhead.main: FONT=helvetica; SIZE=18; TYPESTYLE=Bold)
(small.caps: FONT=helvetica; SMALLCAPS=0.7)
(body.text: FONT=Times; SIZE=14; TYPESTYLE=Plain)
</STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<P STYLE="small.caps">This Would Be Small Caps In Helvetica</P>
<P STYLE="body.text">This would be in Times Roman font</P>
</BODY>

STYLE as an element (in <HEAD> only) would provide the user agent with the
stylesheet itself (whether embedded/internal or external), while STYLE as
an attribute (in <BODY> only) would reference specific stylenames.

This is most natural to anyone coming from, say, Microsoft Word (like myself).

-Walter

__________________________________________________________________________
Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com> | Excel | FoxPro | AppleScript |
Mountain View, CA |--------- programmer ---------|
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