On Mar 1, 2010, at 9:20 PM, L. David Baron wrote:
I believe the rendering section should describe a default style
rule, present in Gecko and in Internet Explorer (and also in
Netscape 4.x and earlier, Mosaic, etc.), that gives borders to
images inside links. In Gecko, this is represented as:
:link img, :visited img, img[usemap], object[usemap] { border: 2px
solid; }
People have expressed concern that this rule is a bad default
because it's a rule that authors frequently override. I agree that
it's a bad default for HTML that is used as an application, but I
think it's a good default for HTML as a document. And I think there
is content written on the assumption that borders would visually
indicate links -- I know I've written some.
I think we're better off not breaking compatibility here, as it's a
very-long-standing (for the Web) precedent. I'd rather see
15-year-old Web pages continue to work as intended rather than
gradually turn them into something that requires 15-year-old
software to read.
For more information (and the reason that prompted me to post here),
see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=452915 .
A few comments:
1) WebKit has never had this rule. We have not had any significant
problem reports based on it. Therefore I doubt there is truly a
compatibility issue.
2) I do not believe the proposed rule is a good default for either
documents or applications. It looks ugly. I randomly checked 10 of the
sites I browse most often and I could not find a single one that
explicitly added this rule for the browsers that don't have it. What's
more, I could not find a single one that retained it for images. This
rule is just a vestigial artifact that Web developers have to work
around.
3) I expect the WebKit community would be against adding such a style
rule, even if a spec said we should.
4) Even the 13-year-old HTML 3.2 spec has border="0" on images used as
links: <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html32>. That's before CSS!
5) I'd like to see some examples of actual 15-year-old Web pages that
render better with this style rule than without, to the point that a
modern reader would consider them broken.
Regards,
Maciej
