[WEB4LIB] RE: Browser sniffing via javascript (was Draft home page not usable on my IE 6)

[Andrew Cunningham]

At 12:17 PM 6/20/01 -0700, Diana Calder wrote:
>
>"Style sheet designers should take care to always ensure that their
>Web pages are in no way dependent on the style sheet." (from
>http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/css/dependence.html )
>


In theory yes. But some CSS properties in the more recent versions of IE
and in teh draft css3 do require specific properties of text to be
explicity controlled by the style sheet. Justification is a perfect example
if I want to justify Syriac or Arabic text but want newspaper style
justification rather than IEs standard kashida based jsutification ... it
needs to be specified in the style sheet.

I will not even mention the problems of RUBY in CJK text .... due to the
current lack of support for ruby .. i might want to hide ruby for any
browser that cannot support it.

and with NN4 and IE4+ when i need to use web font technology for
non-english language web pages, in instances where its not legally possible
to redistribute teh required fonts due to licensing and copyright
restrictions .... 

browsers disparate supporte for CSS, ...

in an ideal world, web pages are not depenedant on stylesheets ... but the
reality is that there are cases where this is impossible ... 


Andj