Re: lynx-dev suppress most indents for Braille terminals

[David Woolley]

>  
> could you give us a brief description of style sheets,
> perhaps with a couple of URLs for more detailed information?

The URL is easy.  It's the same one for everything to do with HTML
standards:  <http://www.w3.org/>.  I'm actually using the PDF version
of, what will now be an obsolete draft:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/1998-css2-19980128>, the latest draft is:
<http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-css2>, but it has probably got beyond draft
stage by now.

Lynx has its own simplified style sheets already, but they are internal.
What I'm talking about is Cascading Style Sheets.

Rather than have <font face..., ...center..., etc. the HTML is clean of
any formatting information and the formatting rules are in a style sheet.
This may be external, at the head of the document, or, unfortunately,
the relevant part can be embedded in the tag.

There are precedence rules for style sheets and a browser or user can
specify that parts of the style sheet have overriding precedence.

The style sheet looks something like this (part of the suggested rendering
for HTML 4.0):

H2  {
    font-size: 1.5em;
    margin: 0.83 em 0;
    }
H3  {
    font-size: 1.17em;
    line-height: 1.17em;
    margin: 1em 0;
    }

Multiple clauses can be given for a tag, and tags can be split into classes
by a CLASS= attribute, or identified individually (ID=, or, for backward
compatibility, NAME=).  A rule may depend on tags being nested in a 
particular way, e.g.:

OL LI {
    list-style-type: decimal;
   }

As a shorthand, multiple tags can be associated with the same set of rules.

A particularly nice feature, which works in IE 4, is that you can specify
an image to be used as a bullet point marker, so designers can produce their
baubles for bullet points whilst still using proper UL, LI, LI, LI, /UL
structures.

Most browsers use CSS1, with CSS2 extensions only useful to a GUI browser,
but CSS2, on which the above examples are based, allows rules to be
qualified by a media type, e.g. to give a specific brailled style and
has specific attributes for screen readers.

Indentation is specified relative to that of the surrounding element, so
an indented DIV will uniformly intent all its contents.

There is also a standard called XML, where nearly all the tags are defined
by the user, and the only way of describing formatting is with style
sheets.