In article <[email protected]>, Richard Porter <[email protected]> wrote:
> What I am saying is that implementing basic html should be a starting > point, Well it was, of course. NetSurf is a web browser after all. :) CSS was also considered early on and it would have been wrong not to do so for all sorts of reasons. CSS was already widely used when NetSurf was started. There were no RISC OS browsers with CSS support at the time NetSurf was started and it would have been silly spend all the time necessary to make a browser that was ultimately no more capable than existing browsers. The CSS specification goes pretty deep into covering most of the stuff needed for HTML layout. It even provides a information on what the default style to give to HTML elements. If we had just focused on HTML to begin with, a rewrite would have been required for CSS support. There's far more to it than this, but anyway I am convinced NetSurf would have become another dead-ended RISC OS browser if it had had not been designed to support CSS from the start. > not something you think about afterwards, simply because there > are so many sites out there that use it and which render adequately > with all other browsers in that respect. HTML features are in exactly the same boat as CSS features, in terms of what gets implemented when in NetSurf. They get implemented when a developer with the necessary time and interest in a particular feature does the work. In the particular case of link colours specified in a BODY attribute, it requires us to have a satisfactory implementation of "6.4.4 Precedence of non-CSS presentational hints" in the CSS 2.1 specification. Currently we have a bit of a bodged mess with some HTML-specified presentational hints incorrectly overriding CSS-set styles or being ignored altogether. We are working on a new CSS parser and selection engine and there is scope in that for creating a sensible way to inject non-CSS presentational hints -- the matter has been given some consideration. > Compatibility problems arise when background colours are specified in > html and foreground colours in CSS, or vice-versa. NetSurf seems to > guarantee problems for any straight html site with a dark background > colour or image. Yes, this is perfectly true and symptomatic of the current bodge. I doubt this particular issue will be fixed before we move to our new CSS engine. This is simply because it would not be sensible to spend a lot of time tinkering with the current code when it will soon be replaced with a better solution which should ultimately fix far more issues than just this link colour issue. Michael -- Michael Drake (tlsa) http://www.netsurf-browser.org/
