>>They really are a separate issue.
>
>They can never be a separate issue. If there is ever to be
>a common standard it needs to be specified. There is no
>way that browsers are going to interpret 5 different types
>of style sheets.
Well the design of HTML is the design of a markup language. The design
of a stylesheet mechanism is primarily that of giving typographical
meaning to the markup. The design of a markup language, and the design
of a typesetting language do not exhibit the overlap you see unless
you are designing something like RTF (which you are more than welcome
to do, but not here).
I agree that a stylesheet mechanism needs to be defined, but I can
see no reason to hold up HTML development when it can proceed in
parallel with stylesheet development (as Dan pointed out). I also
think that number of people with considerable experience developing
interactive stylesheet-driven formatting engines is probably very
small, so people should experiment, understand the issues, and then
come back to comment on design.
>> 3) It will ease development of both stylesheet languages and HTML,
>> because development can take place separately.
>
>How? Stylesheet parsing has to go into HTML parsing engines.
>Whats the use of parsing a stylesheet if your never going
>to apply the style to HTML?
1) HTML development can proceed independently, and to a very large
extent, without thinking about, the stylesheet *language*.
2) Multiple stylesheet formats can be experimented with.
3) Updates to one do not affect the other.
BTW. You are right, parsing stylesheets without applying them is not
terribly useful, but parsing HTML without stylesheets is *very*
useful.
>> 4) With no style information in the HTML, the data is more easily
>
>Not true. Style information is easily ignored or extracted.
Particulaly if you plan to use attribute-driven styles, I very much
doubt that this is true.
>And in the cases where the style sheet only ever applies to one document
>you waste a tremendous amount of resources by forcing a separate net
>connection.
Those cases are less common than you believe. Why penalise the whole
for the sake of a few?