Re: DOCBOOK-APPS: Is it time to rely on CSS?

[Bob Stayton <bobs@caldera.com>]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 01:21:43PM -0500, Norman Walsh wrote:
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> There are more and more bug reports coming in of the form
> 
>   "Why are you doing X? You should be using CSS."
> 
> For example, <b> elements in figure titles, background color on
> tables, etc. Even the inline style markup in admonitions falls into
> this category as, if we relied on CSS, we'd expect an external
> stylesheet to apply that style.
> 
> Historically, the stylesheets have tried to walk some sort of a line
> between relying on CSS and getting reasonable results in browsers that
> don't support CSS.
> 
> Is it time to move that line farther out, removing things that could
> be done with CSS and just expecting CSS to be used?

I think this is ok.

I'm concerned about the transition.
If we are expecting CSS to be used, would we supply a
basic CSS stylesheet that implements these changes and gives
people the framework for customizing?
Otherwise we will probably get complaints about
things that formerly worked being broken.

Also, I think we had better stick to CSS1.  I've found CSS2
conformance to be very inconsistent among browsers.
Unfortunately, that's where the table stuff is.

-- 

Bob Stayton                                 400 Encinal Street
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