> [ rationale deleted ]
I don't think that would help. If this facility
is available then anyone can use it, including
Web novices whose design skills are so terrible
that readers will demand browser overrides anyway.
Whoah. Syntax. Better try that again.
If a document has a good, professional design, readers
are not likely to override it. On the other hand, if publishers
have an "override-override" mechanism, and it gets abused, readers
will just want an "override-override-override" function in
their browsers.
My thinking is that stylesheets -- both the reader's and
the publisher's -- should include a "weight" for each
style category, where a style category is a broad class of
properties like "colors", "indentation", "font sizes",
"font styles", and so on.
If a designer makes heavy use of indentation
to indicate document structure, she would give
"indentation" a large weight and perhaps a lower weight to
"colors". Another designer might select a background
color of YoyoDyne Yellow to convey corporate identity;
in this case "colors" would be given a higher weight.
Colorblind users and those with grayscale monitors
could specify a high weight for "colors" in their
personal stylesheets, to make sure that everything
is legible even if it wasn't designed with them in mind.
Users with small monitors might want their specifications
for "font size" and "margins" to have a higher weight
for the same reason, but be perfectly happy with
whatever colors the document wants to use and so
specify a lower weight for "colors".
Anyway, the basic idea is that there should be a way
to identify what parts of the style sheet are important
and which aren't.
--Joe English
jenglish@crl.com