[whatwg] Fallback styles for legacy user agents [was: Re: Deprecating <small> , <b> ?]

[Calogero Alex Baldacchino]

Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis ha scritto:
> Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
> 
>> I know, and agree with the basic reasons; however I think that 
>> deriving an SGML version (i.e. by adding new entities and elements, as 
>> needed, to an html 4 dtd) should not be very difficoult, and could be 
>> worth the effort (i.e. to graceful degrade the presentation of a menu 
>> element thought as a context menu, wich content should not be shown 
>> untill a right click happens - if the u.a. cannot handle it, not 
>> showing it at all could be a reasonable behaviour). The derived sgml 
>> version should be aimed just for older browsers, while "newer", html 
>> 5-aware ones should just ignore any dtd reference. I'd consider this 
>> chance, at least on the fly - I suspect that the complete break out 
>> with the earlier sgml specifications might carry in an undesireable 
>> side-effect: from one side it solves the problems arised from sgml 
>> partial support/bad implementation and from browser-specific quirks, 
>> but from the other side no mechanism is provided to make 
>> sgml-somehow-based user agents to gain whatever awareness on the newly 
>> defined elements.
> 
> What "SGML-somehow-based user agents"? While many web browsers switch 
> behavior based on what they detect in the first characters of an HTML 
> document (including the doctype declaration), there are no (or at any 
> rate, no remotely /popular/ web browsers) that read text/html DTDs in 
> the way required for this idea to be workable.
> 
> Since all you're proposing is to bake implied STYLE values into the DTD, 
> it seems to me your use-case could be served by making an HTML5 
> "foundation" stylesheet publicly available.
> 
> Compare:
> 
> http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/
> 
> http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/base/
> 
> -- 
> Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Oh, I thought (and hoped) a somewhat basic support were provided... I 
understand I was wrong...

The "foundation" style sheet may be at least a partial solution, but if 
the browser is not aware of an element, I guess its style could not 
apply at all. Anyway, a standard default style sheet could be desireable 
both to have a standard basic layout on all browsers (as far as 
possible, because of possible differences in CSS compliance) and as a 
potential aid for assistive UAs, since the default sheet could cover a 
few basic aureal properties.
Regards,
Alex
 
 
 --
 Email.it, the professional e-mail, gratis per te: http://www.email.it/f
 
 Sponsor:
 A fine mese devi affrontare molte spese? Intesa Sanpaolo ti parla di Check-up finanziario. Prenotalo qui senza impegno
 Clicca qui: http://adv.email.it/cgi-bin/foclick.cgi?mid=8436&d=26-11