Sent by Stefan Huszics on 5 January 2003 16:04
Fortune Elkins wrote:
>> A new DevEdge article on CSS was published this past Monday,
>>
>>
>
>thanks for noting that eric! i immediately removed the title from my page
>template. your statement "any link to a stylesheet that includes a title
>attribute cannot be persistent, and is likely to be ignored by the Web
>browser" scared me straight! <Grin>
>
>
Well, was about to send a message via the feedback function of the page,
but since Eric reads this maillist and this is highly on topic for the
CSS list, I thought I'd comment here in this thread. Mayby others got
constructive arguments of counterarguments :)
I think that article severly exagurates the dangers with using title.
( http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/preferred-stylesheets/ )
For starters, the examplecode used
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" title="Basic styles"
href="basic.css">
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" title="Fish and boats"
href="ocean.css">
Well, that is incorrect coding in error with the specs and thus
unsurprisingly it might give problems in browsers.
Every time you make a coding error you are possibly making your page
unusable in browsers (and often enough using correct code will also
break in buggy browsers). People shouldn't be scared off from using
features, but instead educated about how to use them correctly.
Otherwise Eric, your next article should perhaps be about how using
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP">
can break webpages in browsers too ;)
Also the article doesn't mention any of the benefits of using title, eg
in combination with media
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" title="Basic styles"
media="screen" href="basic.css">
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" title="Basic styles"
media="print" href="print.css">
<link type="text/css" rel="alternate stylesheet" title="Big"
media="screen" href="big.css">
<link type="text/css" rel="alternate stylesheet" title="Big"
media="print" href="printbig.css">
Also, in Mozilla you can take advantage of the view > use style to turn
off CSS compleatly if you want a quick look at how your webpage looks
like in non CSS browsers. But this is only possible if you use title (ie
non persistant stylesheets).
In short, in the real world using title is not as bad as it's described
in the article.
--
/Stefan
Software never has bugs. It just develops random features. =)