In article <[email protected]>,
Bryn Evans <[email protected]> wrote:
[snip]
> A long while ago (2years?) I suggested that the ability for the user
> to disable CSS via a Choices selection might be a useful feature.
> Since then a lot of work has advanced things muchly and I had
> forgotten, until this problem was reported AND diagnosed.
> Would this be a difficult feature to add now?
> (I am not a Coder, just a grateful user)
While I am not involved in the Netsurf project as a coder (have never
been able to get on with C and friends) it strikes me that whether or not
one 'disables' CSS there has to be some way of handling the hints offered
by the old-style html attributes - like "align=center"! If you think about
it a little you will realise that some sort of styling mechanism is still
required - whether the external input is old-style html or proper CSS style
rules.
If I were to be involved in designing this kind of thing then the
first and most important design decision I see is the need to be able to
separate rendering of a document from the structure (ie the various html
elements) and the content (the wuhtor's meanderings) of it.
This is just what the Netsurf designers/implementers have done -
indeed they have even gone further and separated rendering into two parts -
one device-independent, the other device-dependent (ie WIMP, gtk,
frame-buffer).
Whether you are running a Windows box, MacOS, BeOS, linux or RISC OS
box the device-dependent bit is needed.
Whether styling data is coming from html attribute hints or from CSS
style rules the device-independent bit is needed - before anything is ever
made visible/audible!
"Disabling" CSS makes absolutely no difference to the need for both of
the parts of the rendering engine. So! It would seem merely a 'surface'
option which placates a user but makes absolutely no difference in the code
which has to exist for any form of rendering to take place. Perhaps it
isn't a useful option after all??
The only potential difference is that parsing of the 'hints' is
probably simpler than parsing all of the CSS language - but the
device-independent part of the rendering engine still has to be there and
still has to work.
Keith Hopper
--
Inspired!
