Re: CSS1, new draft specification

lilley (lilley@afs.mcc.ac.uk)
Tue, 2 Jan 1996 16:09:13 +0000 (GMT)


Chris Wilson says

> I don't like the disappearance of the $CANVAS. Saying that "In HTML, the
> BODY element is given this role" (of acting as the container for all
> elements) falls down when you think about the effects of the default
> stylesheet on HTML 2.0 documents that do not have a <BODY> (or a <HEAD>, or
> an <HTML>).

All valid HTML 2.0 documents have a body element. For example:

cguhpb [37]: more bodytest.html
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<title>foo</title>
hello.

cguhpb [38]: html-check bodytest.html
titletest.html ...
... valid

They may not, as noted, actually contain <BODY> or <HEAD> or <HTML> *tags*
but if the DTD was designed to allow them to be omitted then that is fine.
So, given that all HTML documents contain a body, and given that
the HTML 3 draft (which allowed multiple BODY elements) is currently
expired, there is no problem with using style information on BODY in
this manner.

> Following this mechanism, I could for example only set the
> background color for documents which had a <BODY>.

Not so.

> I vote to keep the $CANVAS notation from the last draft.

Perhaps, but what does it do that BODY does not? What additional
functionality does it provide?

-- 
Chris Lilley, Technical Author and JISC representative to W3C 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|  Manchester and North Training & Education Centre   ( MAN T&EC )  |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Computer Graphics Unit,             Email: Chris.Lilley@mcc.ac.uk |
| Manchester Computing Centre,        Voice: +44 161 275 6045       |
| Oxford Road, Manchester, UK.          Fax: +44 161 275 6040       |
| M13 9PL                            BioMOO: ChrisL                 |
| Timezone: UTC        URI: http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/ | 
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+