UA's to ignore bad web designers?

[Els]

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/selector.html#x38

<quote>
User agents are not required to reflow a currently displayed document
due to pseudo-class transitions. For instance, a style sheet may
specify that the 'font-size' of an :active link should be larger than
that of an inactive link, but since this may cause letters to change
position when the reader selects the link, a UA may ignore the
corresponding style rule.
</quote>

Sounds to me like UA's are allowed to discard any rules from bad
webdesigners because they're bad ideas. Means that even if I have
catered for the page to remain balanced whilst giving a larger font on
hover or active, the UA may just ignore this style rule because other
designers fail to recognize the issue :S

 

[Andy Dingley]

It was somewhere outside Barstow when Els <[email protected]>
wrote:

[W3C]

Sounds to me like UA's are allowed to discard any rules from bad
webdesigners because they're bad ideas.

No, that's not what it says at all. It says they don't need to
_reflow_ a document owing to _transitions_ arising from pseudo
classes. In practice this means a:hover.

Note the use of "reflow". They're not talking about ignoring them when
the page is first drawn, but only if it changes during viewing.


Your point that "UA's might ignore dumb things" is a worthy issue to
raise (maybe a UA will change text colours if they're otherwise
invisible - some limited colour displays already do this). But it's
not supported by the W3C's statement that you quoted.

 

[Toby Inkster]

User agents are not required to reflow a currently displayed document
due to pseudo-class transitions.

For a demonstration of this, try:

a:hover { font-size: bigger; font-weight: bolder; }

in Opera 6.x.