Style Sheets

Sat May 16 14:01:01 EDT 1998

On Fri, 15 May 1998, Jeff Bobicki wrote:

> 2) Style is nice ... but using this technique shuts out a VERY large
> percentage of browsers today.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Browsers that do not support style sheets
are perfectly comfortable ignoring a tag in the <HEAD> like this:

<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/css" HREF="/Styles/style1">

The cardinal rule of browsers is "if you see a tag you don't recognize,
ignore it". It *isn't* "if you see a tag you don't recognize, crash".
What we *do* need to be careful of is browsers or browser versions that do
a poor job of implementing style sheets, and therefore may see something
in the style sheet it doesn't like. That's why for now I've only
implemented styles on the Web4Lib Web site until I've been able to test
for compatibility. But browsers that don't understand style sheets at all
are perfectly happy displaying the documents as they always have.

So far I've not detected any compatibility problems, but I would
appreciate reports from any of you on any problems you have with documents
at the Web4Lib site at:

http://sunsite.Berkeley.EDU/Web4Lib/

Also, I wanted to throw in two cents related to what Karen Schneider
<kgs at bluehighways.com> asked:

>So, one question may be, how can we produce stylesheets with maximum
>accuracy, ease and flexibility?

In following up on one of the CSS resources that Thomas Dowling kindly
posted for our assistance, I discovered a tool that got me going with
style sheets literally within minutes. It is called the "Core CSS
Development Interface" and is produced by Todd Fahrner of Verso. It is
available at:

http://style.verso.com/stylist.html

It can be fun to play around with until you find a combination you like,
then you can display the resulting style sheet and drop it on your server.
Unfortunately that doesn't provide the kind of "safe serving" capability
that the Verso server provides, with modules being withheld from browsers
that are not compatible with them, but software such as that may soon
become more available.

As time goes on, there are likely to be other such quick-start tools, as
well as stylesheet editors that make it easier. 
Roy