Re: draft-ietf-html-style-00.txt & class as a general selector

Gavin Nicol ([email protected])
Fri, 8 Dec 1995 10:43:42 -0500


>> LI,B=4 ; All <B> elements that are the 4th <B> to occur
>> within an <LI>
>> LI=2,B=1 ; The first <B> inside the second <LI> in the
>> document
>
>These look fragile. They may suit the purposes of TEI, but the stylesheet
>breaks if I add an intervening element. For dynamic documents that are
>often revised, this looks like a problem.

Anything based on positioning within a tree is fragile, and in such
cases, it would be better to hook the style onto an attribute, or
through a more general name like "LI,B" (which references a class of
<B> elements). That does not mean they are not useful though.

I think you'll find that in the general case, people will not use such
things anyway. In EBT's DynaText, for example, it is *very* rare to see
people setting a style for one particular element, even though it is
possible.