2013-06-27 21:02, John A. Johnson wrote:
On Jun 27, 2013, at 10:54 AM, Philip Taylor <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
As the browser is not an element in the document tree, the <html>
element cannot inherit any properties from it. It may well acquire
them in some other way, but this is not inheritance /qua/ inheritance.
Isn't it the case that browser defaults show themselves in elements unless
those elements are told differently by CSS?
Yes. (Well, to be exact, "unless told differently in CSS, in
presentational HTML attributes, or in user commands in a browser".) But
this is not inheritance. Inheritance is a specific, well-defined concept
in CSS.
one example I can think of is that <a> defaults to blue with an underline.
Well, more exactly, <a> defaults to a blueish color with underline if
the element has the href attribute and the link has not been visited
recently. This is not inheritance; it *prevents* inheritance - normally,
an element would e.g. inherit color from its parent.
The browser defaults are in principle browser-specific, though rather
systematically across browsers, with some exceptions. The sample style
sheet in CSS 2.1 spec describes some common defaults, but a few of them
are unrealistic, not corresponding to browser behavior. There is a more
realistic (and more extensive) description of defaults in the Rendering
section of the HTML5 CR. The rules are not requirements, but they are
presented as "expected rendering". They may actually become
requirements, if a browser vendor claims to support the expected
rendering. Thus, we can expect browser defaults to remain similar or
become even more similar.
In particular, HTML5 contains the "expected rendering" rules
:link { color: #0000EE; }
:visited { color: #551A8B; }
:link, :visited { text-decoration: underline; }
These differ somewhat from previously common defaults that have been
mentioned in many descriptions, namely blue = #0000FF for unvisited
links and purple = #800080 for visited links.
Yucca
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