[whatwg] Warnings for non-applicable properties

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009, Martin Atkins wrote:
> 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?

Does it make any difference? The net result is that the user and the 
author can't rely on a single style sheet. What benefit would a definite 
UA style sheet be, if not that?


> 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.

There wouldn't be much point to that requirement, since it couldn't be 
usefully tested.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'