Going to make some changes to the website

[Rave]

Ja I'm familiar with CSS, I use it at work for my company's sites & web apps. As a developer I prefer to enforce the styles of the site on the users so they will see the website how it is intended to

[SM5POR]

Ja I'm familiar with CSS, I use it at work for my company's sites & web apps. As a developer I prefer to enforce the styles of the site on the users so they will see the website how it is intended to

You can't "enforce" any particular style beyond simply providing it to be applied by my browser, if I allow it to. Either you provide the style sheet, or you don't. There is no way for you to say "this is how my website is intended to look, but I'm not enforcing it". Therefore your claim to "enforce" your style is meaningless.

And if providing a style sheet is your only means of making your website look in a particular way, what are the browser configuration options intended to apply to? The user's private files only? My browser offers me a selection of 100 different fonts, to be used for... what? Web pages without style sheets?

An HTML browser takes the information content of a page and presents it in a way suitable to the user's environment. As a page author, you can direct the presentation in various ways, but if you insist that it must look exactly as it looks on your screen, you may also have to change the browser's window size and position in ways that may not be convenient to the user. Somewhere a compromise must be made between sender and recipient, or you might as well demand that I have the same kind of software, furniture and wall decorations that you have in your office, because otherwise the visual context will not be correct...

When the website eventually offers the user a number of choices affecting its layout, it appears that the website wasn't "intended" to look in any particular way after all, and we have merely reinvented a poorly functioning wheel after having destroyed the wheels that already existed.

[Rave]

Look I'm well aware of how HTML and CSS work. I like CSS because you can specify how you want things to be formatted. If you specify the font formatting with your CSS then the browser settings don't get applied. When you choose the font in your browser it is only applied to the text which doesn't have a style already assigned. Therefore you can 'force' what font is displayed, the same way you can 'force' table border widths and colours. If I want all of my links to be green, I can make them green, if I want all of my text 8pt for some reason then I can do it. Not every element has to have a style applied to it if the page uses a style sheet and you can apply your browser settings to those elements. By applying the style I want to to every element on every page I can negate the efforts of the user to change the appearance, if I should want to, and enforce how I want it to appear.

Aside from that, why are you arguing with me about CSS after I just asked you a simple question as to how one could apply t heir own stylesheet in a browser?

[Borgs8472]

here is no way for you to say "this is how my website is intended to look, but I'm not enforcing it".

Surely providing a font/size is enforcing it, and not specifying is allowing browser settings to take much more effect?

[SM5POR]

Aside from that, why are you arguing with me about CSS after I just asked you a simple question as to how one could apply t heir own stylesheet in a browser?

Because after you asked me that question and I replied to it, you introduced the notion of "enforcing" a particular style of presentation, as if users had no choice but to obey it (like a law). We may simply disagree on the terminology here, in which case this argument won't lead anywhere, and I suppose we may just as well drop it.

[SM5POR]

Surely providing a font/size is enforcing it, and not specifying is allowing browser settings to take much more effect?

If you don't specify a particular font, then nobody can even tell what the page is "supposed" to look like.

I suggest that you use 16pt Times Roman to read this passage. Do I force you to do so? No, but I provide you with the information necessary to manually change your browser settings and read the passage the way I intended it to be read. In case you don't bother to follow my advice, there is nothing I can do to overrule your decision; you decide whether to care about my advice at all.

The same applies if I express this advice in HTML; I know that most browsers will follow it, but you, the user, have (or at least should have) full control over the software you run, and you can tell your software to do your bidding alone. I can't, and I would consider it improper to even try to question your ultimate authority over your own computer.

It's an issue that relates to the media industry using technology to try to "enforce" certain restrictions on how and when their recordings may be reproduced on private computers (region coding, no fast forward and so on).

We are of course getting a bit off topic here; I feel strongly about this subject and I'm easily carried away discussing it. If others want to discuss it too, we might start a separate thread about it, but maybe our time is better spent on the PPI website and its expected functionality.

[Borgs8472]

Oh, you're saying that browsers can always do what the hell they want. Sure they can. But they don't and most of the time this is a good thing for the purpose of making a standard cross-browser compatible site.