Default anchor rendering, HTML vs CSS

dorayme wrote:

The OP was wondering about conflicting standards between HTML and CSS
and the consensus here seems to be there is no real conflict.

Surely there isn't - and the HTML and CSS descriptions referred to aren't
even standards. Their level of exactness is too low to let us decide, in
general, a question about conflict.

But the question about how the HTML "really ought
to default to" in the absence of default style sheets is either
unclear or not a good question.

It is, anyway, addressed (vaguely, but still) in all HTML specifications up
to and including HTML 4.01. And XHTML, in its lazyness, refers to HTML 4.01,
explicitly or implicitly, in almost all matters of semantics.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

On 11 Okt, 02:43, yaugin <yau... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

[...]

From my understanding, these two standards are somewhat conflicting.
The HTML standard basically acknowledges that browsers typically
perform special rendering for anchors but makes no specification as
such. Under CSS, an anchor would be an inline element and so should
use the same text-decoration as its parent block. Assuming the default
as 'none', most browsers are technically wrong under CSS to render
anchors with an underline if the stylesheet is not explicitly set to
do so.

The CSS spesification says that browser *must* "apply a default style
sheet (or behave as if they did)", and that elements should be
presented in a way you could expect from the markup language.

"User agent: Conforming user agents must apply a default style sheet
(or behave as if they did). A user agent's default style sheet should
present the elements of the document language in ways that satisfy
general presentation expectations for the document language (e.g., for
visual browsers, the EM element in HTML is presented using an italic
font). See A sample style sheet for HTML for a recommended default
style sheet for HTML documents."

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/cascade.html#default-style-sheet

If you are planning to ditch the underline on links, and make sure
that people with color blindness can't tell the difference between
ordinary text and links, there is tools to simulate different types of
color blindness, e.g:

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

The safest is, however, to use little or no contrast.