---$CANVAS does seem like a nicely intuitive abstraction. It also seems ugly to hang the defaults on the HTML or BODY elements that users may not know about or recognize as obvious places for defaults (although, of course, the user interface to style information wouldn't necessarily have to expose those terms, either).
One advantage to a $CANVAS abstraction is that it could reasonably include areas outside the document; the <TITLE> is one thing that a reasonable UA might choose to render that is outside the BODY...
scott
-- scott preece motorola/mcg urbana design center 1101 e. university, urbana, il 61801 phone: 217-384-8589 fax: 217-384-8550 internet mail: [email protected]