Specifying style notation in <link>

Michael Seaton ([email protected])
Fri, 1 Dec 1995 00:07:50 +0000


I feel that it would be useful to have a standard <link> attribute
that indicates the style-notation of a linked style sheet, perhaps
along the lines of:

<link rel=style href="[uri]" type="[notation]">

The notation-string could also have a defined syntax, e.g.:

"notation//conformance-level"

This would then look something like:

<head>
<link rel=style href="format.css" type="CSS//1.0">
<link rel=style href="format.css2" type="CSS//2.0">
<link rel=style href="format.sty" type="NaviStyle//1.1">
<link rel=style href="format.dsssll" type="DSSSL-Lite//1.0">
<title>A Styled Document</title>
</head>

Reasons for this extension:

* Some servers still cut off file-extensions at three
characters, making it very difficult to reserve distinct
extensions for every possible notation and conformance level.

* Different vendors may try to use the same extension to identify
their style notations. (How many other vendors besides NaviSoft do
you think are going to want to use '.sty'?)

* Sending out HTTP requests to get the content-type of every sheet
listed could cause a noticable delay in loading a document.

* Even with the current set of content-types, misconfigured
servers are a frequent problem. A succession of many new
content-types for style-sheets could exacerbate this problem.
(This is to say nothing about documents which are being served by
protocols which do not pass the content-type at all.)

There should also be some way of associating a style sheet with certain
display properties or platforms, although it is not clear to me how
this could be gone about.

--
Michael Seaton([email protected])