On Sun, 2011-02-13 at 17:03 +0000, Richard Porter wrote: > On 13 Feb 2011 Dave Higton wrote: > > > My experiments yesterday and today show that Netsurf ignores font > > attributes within HTML, e.g. > > > <font face="monospace"> (and all the other generic face types) > > are ignored, whereas the equivalent within a CSS is obeyed. > > > Is this a deliberate design decision?
No. It's a bug. > I think this is the usual problem that priority has been given to CSS > over plain html and anything that is "deprecated" even if it's in > widespread use. The size and color attributes are supported though. This is not the case. There is a defined place in the CSS cascade for these legacy presentational hints. However, until we replaced NetSurf's original CSS implementation with libcss, there was no mechanism for allowing the presentational hints to be used when determining the styling of an element. What support did exist for them at the time mostly comprised layers of ugly hackery to approximate the right thing. Invariably, this went wrong. Today, however, we do have the appropriate hooks in place. Thus supporting all of these legacy presentational hints is relatively trivial and totally opaque to most of the browser. If someone feels adventurous, they could compare section 10.2 of the HTML5 specification (specifically, anything where "presentational hint" is mentioned) with the node_presentational_hint function in css/select.c in NetSurf's sources to see what's missing. John.
