Posted by Neredbojias on 02/25/06 08:06

With neither quill nor qualm, Alan J. Flavell quothed:

> On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, Neredbojias wrote:
>
> > Suppose I have many lines of white text and decide to span one word
> > to change its color to yellow. Do I need to state a background?
>
> Do you "need" to? - No, you're entitled to ignore a warning, but it's
> best to understand the warning before deciding to ignore it.

Agreed, -at least you should understand the css cascading of style
sheets which prompt the warning.

> Consider
> e.g cascading with a stylesheet which defined the background for span
> to be yellow.

Since you surely mean a user stylesheet, suppose my body text color was
yellow? -With a brown body background? If a hypothetical user
_overrides_ page settings, it is his responsibility to ensure that he
does not err in his endeavors. "Cascading" does _not_ mean having to
set a background-color for every color designated. In fact, it means
rather the opposite.

> Is it *good practice* to do so? - I'd say yes, and so say the folks
> at the W3C CSS "validator".

You're undoubtedly right here, but it reminds me a lot of Microsoft's
old practice of "covering for" third-party mistakes. That does not lead
to markup excellence.

> But sometimes there's no choice (e.g if
> you want the background image of an outer element to "shine through"
> an inner element at the same time as specifying text colour for that
> inner element).

Transparent??

> > Well... It purports to be a validator,
>
> The problem here is that in an SGML/XML context, the term "validator"
> has a very specialised meaning, which matters (or ought to) to HTML
> authors. CSS is neither SGML nor XML, and those who care about the
> meaning of words would prefer not to have the water muddied by this
> kind of sloppy terminology.

Okay, I dunno, and I'm not that much into it to be persnickety. I do
know the damn thing has errors, so whether a "validator" or a "checker",
it's flawed.

--
Neredbojias
Contrary to popular belief, it is believable.

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