Re: The style agenda

David - Morris (dwm@shell.portal.com)
Thu, 8 Jun 1995 05:38:32 +0500


On Thu, 1 Jun 1995, Terry Allen wrote:

> Hakon writes:

>
> | buttons, choosing to display or hide them is also a rendering issue
> | since you gain/loose screen real-estate depending on your choice. I
> | would hope the style sheet mechanism would convey rendering
> | information peripheral to HTML as well. Users will ask for it.
>
> You're assuming the buttons would be rendered in the text window,
> which would not be a useful way to handle them (change the frame,
> institute a toolbar; but these are choices for developers to make).

Let me second and third Terry's observation. I can understand and
even tolerate the notion that there is some small subset of information
which the publisher has the right to insist I see it as intended or
a conforming user agent should refuse to present the information and
anything the publisher has 'bound' to the required material. The legal
example and warnings about electrocution come to mind. *BUT* the appearance
of my user agent and the various features its developers have created
to differentiate it from its competition is none of the publishers
business. Rendering within the 'information window' should be
controlled by the style sheet mechanism, the html or other data
encoding/description language, etc. Anything external to the
information (content? publishing? text seems to limiting) window is
negotiated between me the user and my user agent developers. I suppose
that the UA developers might choose to encode the result of that
negotiation in a syntax compatible with style sheets but as an
adjunct to a standards group, we shouldn't care.

> | Text flow around floating images does not fit well into this model,
> | e.g. you probably don't want to use the normal margins when placing
> | text next to an image.
>
> Could you expand on that? Which margins become inappropriate?

Seems to me that if normal margins aren't appropriate, perhaps there
isn't enough space next to the image to flow text at all?

Dave Morris