


From: Laurens Holst <lholst@students.cs.uu.nl>
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 23:30:48 +0200
Message-ID: <4251B208.2090906@students.cs.uu.nl>
To: www-style@w3.org

Brian Sexton wrote:
> I like this solution, but I would like to see it taken even a step 
> further by applying it to an entire style sheet or at least a block of 
> selectors such that if every property in the style sheet or block is not 
> known and supported, the whole thing is ignored.

I think that if you exclude portions of CSS this large from your page, 
you are basically on the ‘browser detection’ track again. Because if you 
require all the properties in a certain file, I cannot imagine it 
matching more than one browser.

Also, if you want to add one single property as a slight tweak for a 
supporting browser, you’ll have to put it in an entirely different 
stylesheet. Not really flexible :/.

I understand that what you’re saying is a case of progressive 
enhancement vs. separate layouts for down-level clients, but in practice 
I just cannot see this being used for that purpose.

Making entirely different versions is a lot of effort, and also against 
the spirit of CSS itself (which is to gracefully degrade). From a 
practical point of view, usually you will want to re-use large portions 
of your CSS even when you have different ‘versions’ (think text styling 
and colour schemes), just for the sake of keeping the visual identity 
the same, avoiding code duplication, saving effort.

I don’t think this specific proposal has a viable use-case.


Received on Monday, 4 April 2005 21:30:52 GMT
