Re: lynx-dev patch

[Vlad Harchev]

On Tue, 13 Jul 1999, David Woolley wrote:

> > 
> > begin 644 patch.gz
> > M'XL("`QGC#<``W!A=&-H`.P\:W/:R+*?X5?,2:IBS"N(AY]QSF*0`[L8?'C$
> 
> My initial reaction to the actual code is that it is short sighted and
> changed in the wrong place.  A proper CSS implementation would allow
> justification to be turned back on in nested structures (and possibly
> not turned on at the outermost level).  This implementation assumes
> that it is turned on by the HTML element, inherited through most,
> and turned off by a few, and once off it it off until the element
> that turned it off is popped from the parse stack.

 Currenlty justification is turned on by element, but for elements that can't
contain anything reasonable to justify (except CENTER), they are
 BANNER,CENTER, H[1-6], PRE, SAMP, TABLE, XMP
 so IMO there is no loss in flexibility.  And as for CENTER, I seems only
badly formatted document use it (the style sheets should be used for this),
so we don't loose a lot (at least documents that are wrapped in CENTER are
very rare).
 
> It has also be associated with parsing information for elements, when
> it really belongs with the style information for elements.

 Currently, no CSS support is present in the lynx. I wished to implement
justification in a bound period of my time (so entire patch was completed 
in 3 days). And there are a few styles lynx has now, so binding justification-
ability to them will make html model very rough (eg there is no style for
TABLE, for BANNER).

> A full CSS implementation would associate at least the following
> possibilities with each element (actually with a style selector pattern):
> inherit, right, left, centre, or justify, not just the inherit and 
> don't justify of the current patch.

As for CSS implementation in lynx (I said it several times, but I repeat):
IMO it will be bad thing to parse CSSes included in or referenced by the
documents that are read from the web (since they are suited for GUI browsers).
But lynx should have something to contol various things like justification, 
alignment, indents, spaces before and after, etc, I agree. But it can have any
format of description - so (it seems to me) it will be the one that is easier
to parse (or write parser for), not that W3C recommends.

What additional style sheets do you think should be added to lynx?

Have you tried this patch? 

Anyway, you are can turn justification off if you don't like it.

 Best regards,
  -Vlad