The most likely of these to become established on the web appear to be those concerned with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
The author's own original proposals may be found here. These proposals contain matter of some interest to the discussion here. However some of these have now been implemented in style sheets, and other aspects significantly affect the proposals made there.
Style sheets can add significantly to the complexity of HTML documents, though they maintain HTML's traditional human readable qualities.
Although in a sense, style sheets are hardly part of HTML and they have a structure more closely related to a scripting languages than to orthodox HTML tags, they have been approved by the W3C and look set to establish themselves as a universally readable format.
The convential position of the <STYLE> tag pair seems to be unusual. It is not clear if its position is specified in the standard, but the example documents all position the 'STYLE' elements inside the document's header. The aesthetic effect of this is questionable and quite what style information has to do with the header is not clear. Certainly until now information relating to the background to be used on a page has been stored outside the header. More significantly, it would seem that the main efect of this positioning will be to cause search engines and document scanners parsing the page to compose indexes from relevant 'META' elements and other items of interest to waste time by wading through loads of irrelevant style information before they encounder the </HEAD> marker. This last point will become more important as time passes and three dimensional 'fly-throughs' of the documents 'surrounding' the current one are used with greater frequency by browsers. The bandwidth of document's headers will then become far more critical.
In the document referred to above, a closely related set of proposals to what has become the modern style sheet was proposed.
These included methods of specifing:
Style sheets do not appear to have addressed the issue of multiple layer backgrounds, which seems an important one as far as bandwidth issues and algorithmic textures are concerned, but this would appear to be a fairly simple extension to the format.Issues connected with borders and edges have been partly addressed in the style steet proposals, though perhaps not with the flexibility provided by using tesselated images.
The author's To <BODY> tag proposals are not affected by style sheets.
His, Structural proposals are, however, and it would now appear to be sensible for the author to abandon his own structural proposals, and target his proposals concerning watermark images, multiple layer backgrounds (important) and background tables at embedding these in style-sheets.
Background tables would seem to have been made more complex by the apparent abandonment of the structure of HTML by the style sheet proposals and the adoption of a scripting language. This has meant that there are a large number of elements in style-sheets which duplicate the functionality of existing HTML tags, but require a seperate parser and interpreter to be constructed within the browser to handle them.
This would be the case with background tables if these were to be imlemented as extensions to the style sheet proposals. As tables are a complex part of HTML in the first place, it would seem that writing a complete new style sheet tables interface would be a large quantity of additional code for relatively little gain. No doubt those responsible for developing the protocol are aware of the need to position backgrounds and images within HTML documents.
Indeed style sheets already have some primitive mechanisms to accomplish this which are an improvement over the current state of affairs and have the advantage of being significantly simpler than tables, although they do not have their flexibility. Details of these proposals may be found here and here.
Multiple layer background images are not currently part of the style sheet proposals. However, these would appear to be quite important, as without them, the variety of images convenient to be used as backdrops is significantly impoverished. Watermark images are still restricted again to follow the background tiling. Hopefully these issues will be addressed. Indeed, now that the latest incarnation of Netscape's browser incorporates support for the <LAYERS> tag, it is difficult to see how other vendors can fail to address this issue in one way or another before very long.
Style Sheet Links
For more details of style sheets, visitors are referred to:
Other links
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