Re: color text?

Alex Hopmann (hopmann@holonet.net)
Tue, 2 May 95 00:21:07 EDT

>>>>>> "EB" == Eric Bina <ebina@netscape.com> writes:
>EB> Seems to me, if everyone who wants to have customized funky colors
>EB> on their home page has their own style-sheet, then the style-sheet
>EB> above usually will NOT be in my cache.
>
>However, if instead of doing funky colors on a home page, you are
>presenting a series of documents with internally consistent styles,
>cached style sheets would seem to be a more effective way of doing it.
>
>This would seem to be especially true for longer examples like the one
>in Hakon's example, <9505012119.AA27255@www4.cern.ch>, where other
>things are being done besides setting colors.
>
>Giving a non-random example, <URL:http://www.cshl.org/journals/>, each
>of those 3 journals on the printed page have a distinct 'style' which
>style-sheets can recreate and all the documents for a particular
>journal use the same style sheet. Having those style sheets cached
>would probably be of benefit.
Ok, so what we have established here is:
1) People use HTML for different things.
2) Some people use HTML for publishing. They create many documents, with
similar styles. They spend lots of time making it look right on different
browsers, etc. They carefully design documents. This is true for both online
and offline document creation. Its why powerful word processing software
invariable has some sort of style sheet capability. Its why HTML should also
have a style sheet capability.
3) Other people use HTML for other things. Their own home page, A quick note
to a friend. A public discussion. NOTE: HTML IS GOING TO BE AN EMAIL
TRANSPORT, just because there are so many things out there that can display
it (Well, not just. There are lots of good reasons. Like that hotlinks in
email is a very cool idea. And sorry about shouting in the previous
sentance). This is also true both online and offline. This is why word
processing software, just about always has the ability to directly set
colors, fonts, etc. Its why HTML should have things like attributes on the
BODY tag (as proposed by netscape) as well as a character tag like I
proposed back in San Jose, that lets you do some quick character markup.

I guess the reason we are all here in this working group is because there
are so many different uses for WWW related technologies (HTTP, HTML) and its
so easy to stay focused on your own (perhapse publishing) and forget others.
I know of dozens of cool uses of HTML that are not publishing, and I think
should not have their own protocols, since HTML is such a good solution
already. Lets not ignore the 5-10% of extra stuff that makes it a great
solution.

Oh, and by the way, I would also like to add that if you are creating tools
for a specific audience that doesnt need to set colors, fine. Ignore the
color attributes, and background patterns also. If your audience demands
these features, add them, and lets make sure they work in a compadible and
sensible way.

Alex Hopmann
ResNova Software, Inc.
hopmann@holonet.net