[whatwg] [WA1] The a element could be empty

[Matthew Raymond]

Jim Ley wrote:
> On 9/4/05, Matthew Raymond <mattraymond at earthlink.net> wrote:
>>Jim Ley wrote:
>>>Loads, IE, Mozilla Family, Opera and Safari perhaps being the
>>>commonest - ie CSS can be disabled in all of them distinct from
>>>disabling script.
>>
>>  You're not entirely correct about how these browsers support turning
>>off CSS. IE actually doesn't support it.
> 
> There's lots of ways of disabling stylesheets in IE without a
> universal user stylesheet, expressions, behaviours on
> style/link/element etc.

   None of which are obvious to the average user.

>>Mozilla Firefox allows you
>>to turn off styling for the screen media, but not the print media. 
> 
> I never realised FF was so flawed, thanks for correcting me.

   Is it a flaw? People tend to have print settings that can override a
good portion of the styling anyways, so when you take into account that
you'll be loosing necessary print-specific styling when disabling CSS
for that media, maybe the use case for disabling CSS for print media
just isn't there.

>>  Of course, I asked about browsers that don't SUPPORT both Javascript
>>and CSS, not about browser that allow you to turn it off if you so desire.
> 
> I couldn't see the relevance of browsers which didn't support both, as
> disabled CSS is equivalent for the purposes at discussion.

   If having a Javascript-capable browser effectively means that you
have a CSS-capable browser, then you don't need additional Javascript in
order to hide the button when printing. This is especially true for
printing from the browser menu, where you can't modify the DOM without
proprietary print-specific events.

   <idle_thought>Do buttons even need to be visible when printing? If
not, hiding them would probably be the most logical default styling in
the print media.</idle_thought>

>>  Wrong. CSS can't be disabled for Firefox.
> 
> Yes, but this is obviously a horrible bug, and will undoubtedly be
> fixed in future options, CSS 1 strongly recommends that users be able
> to disable stylesheets, why ignore a strong recommendation from the
> specification?

   I can't find that recommendation in CSS1. As a matter of fact, I
don't think CSS1 has media types or print-specific properties. Are you
sure that's not in CSS 2 or something? (Not saying it isn't there. I'd
just like to know what it specifically says.)