I agree wholeheartedly. The HTML "required" Style Sheet proposal should be
simple. Other standards like DSSSL will support those advanced features.
If the W3C Style sheet proposal is too complex, the browser writers will
ignore it altogether.
> > Another case: what if I want all occurences of a particular product
> > name to appear with a given attribute combination? There is no
> > <PRODNAME> tag I could subclass to change the font style, although an
> > <EM> *might* work... what if I want all occurences of a certain word
> > to appear in small caps? No character-level tag I know of is a good
> > substitute for small caps.
You do not need this. HTML is an SGML language. SGML supports entities.
Entities do what you ask. You just make a &prodname; entity and the
browser should do the rest. Your &prodname; entity can have all of the
formatting you need.
> > A generic character-level text container tag in HTML 3.0 would be
> > extremely useful for applying styles to certain blocks of text. I propose
> > the following tag:
> >
> > <TEXT>...</TEXT>
>
> This would be very useful indeed, and will talk to Dave Raggett about
> it.
I oppose this tag, and have shown why it is not necessary in this context.
In another post I will show why it is not necessary in the Economist
example described in the proposal. This tag would be incredibly,
horrifically easy to abuse when you dont' feel like looking up a tag
in the HTML Spec.
Paul Prescod