[whatwg] Warnings for non-applicable properties

[Martin Atkins]

Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Nov 2008, Paul Arzul wrote:
>> is it unfortunate that the html4 stylesheet is only informative? perhaps 
>> html5 could then consider giving us a normative default user agent 
>> stylesheet - or at least a normative version with only display 
>> properties.
> 
> The spec has a semi-normative one now. User agents aren't required to 
> follow it, because we never know when they might apply styles for 
> particular users with special needs.
> 

Could that arguably be considered to be a machine-generated user stylesheet?

I tend to think of the settings my browser has for choosing default 
fonts and so forth to be functionally equivalent to me writing a user 
stylesheet that contains the same settings.

This would allow the HTML spec to normatively require browsers to use a 
particular default stylesheet (or, indeed, act as if they've done so) 
while still allowing for user-specific alterations of various kinds.

(I believe that Mozilla is already implemented as above, more or less.)