From: Glenn Adams <glenn@stonehand.com>
|
| That's the trouble. You are attempting language design based on your
| speculations about perceived needs. As I have said very early in these
| threads, one shouldn't design compromise into a language (or anything
| else) unless one had either good empirical data on hand or clear historical
| compability requirements.
---I don't believe the STYLE attribute represents "designing compromise into the language". I think it is very natural to allow styling information to be recorded in in the same format either in-situ, indirectly through a local stylesheet, indirectly through a referenced stylesheet, or externally through the reader's browser. This seems like reasonably elegant mechanism to me. I understand it fails to implement the policy you prefer, but taken just as mechanism I think it is no less elegant and no less supportable than the restricted version you suggest.
| I don't believe that historical requirements | can be invoked here so we're left with empirical requirements for which | we have no real data. Given this fact (and I'd challenge anyone to | effectively dispute this as a fact) and given that the STYLE attribute | as has been discussed violates basic principles on at least two counts: | (1) don't provide multiple ways of saying the same thing when one will | suffice;
---Actually, I don't think it provides "another way of saying the same thing", it simply allows the recording of the same styling information in an additional place; since the information is already allowed to be in an open sequence of places, I don't think the addition pollutes the model.
| and (2) don't mix form and content,
It simply allows recording the form information by value rather than by name. This is a notational convenience. Since the in-situ form is mechanically transformable to the stylesheet form and back, I claim they are equivalent from a "separation of form and content" point of view.
--- | I'd suggest that the authors | of DRAFT-IETF-HTML-STYLE-00.TXT remove or modify their proposed use of | a STYLE attribute as a binding mechanism. A modification which would | be acceptable to me is to specify the declared value of the STYLE | attribute to be either NAME or NAMES.---I, obviously, suggest that the authors of the the draft leave STYLE as it is or indicate that the content can either be a value in the syntax of whatever style notation is in effect or be a name resolvable by the style mechanism.
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