Why was this feature stripped from Phoenix builds? I'm using 0.4 now and Use Style is not in the View menu.

Good question. Marking this as an enhancement and setting status to NEW.

This is a design decision, not a bug and the Phoenix team has already said that this should be implemented as an extension (probably with a site-navigation toolbar) and not as part of the core browser

*** Bug 199510 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Asa Dotzler wrote: > This is a design decision, not a bug and the Phoenix team has already said > that this should be implemented as an extension (probably with a > site-navigation toolbar) and not as part of the core browser The lack of this feature causes HUGE pain for people who want to use MathML - is that "wanted", too?

*** Bug 199510 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

"User agents should allow users to select from alternate style sheets." -- http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/present/styles.html#h-14.3.1 If you want to mark this as dependent on 83663, fine, but it should not be an "extension" that the user must seek to enable. If there are other technical reasons why this should not be implemented, I need to know. Thanks, fantasai

--> me

The current plan is to make alternate stylesheets part of the "<link> toolbar." The UI will be more evident than it is now, in that the toolbar will actually appear to offer the choice of alternate sheets (making it more obvious that the sheets are available). The "<link> toolbar" extension will be a removable extension, but we'll have it installed by default (disabled) so that you can easily turn it on.

> The current plan is to make alternate stylesheets part of the "<link> toolbar." > ... Wonderful! But you still need menu items corresponding to the toolbar bit, and those should be part of the core menus. /That/ is what this bug is about.

The new Mozilla browser is going to be extremely layered, offering a range of features from a barebones browser installation up to the fully loaded installation. Alternate stylesheet UI (IMO) falls somewhere in the middle. It's not something you'd put into the most basic installation.

> It's not something you'd put into the most basic installation. If you look on alternate styles only as offering a set of stylistic choices, then perhaps that would be true. Whether the page uses a blue or green background is not particularly important. However, alternate styles go beyond that. I have, for example, a page in which I use alternate styles to switch between full tag descriptions, short (mainly syntactic) descriptions, and a definition list giving the tag name and a one-line purpose. Other pages use alternate styles to display editing information--by using "display: none" on <del> and no special styling of <ins> by default and using "text-decoration: line-through" and "color: red; font-weight: bold" on those elements in an alternate sheet. This information will not be accessible without alternate style support. (Or without disabling all styles and relying on ua.css.) With powerful style sheets, the manipulations on an XML document can have drastic effects on what information is displayed and how it is organized and transmitted to the reader. Therefore I believe this switch is core functionality that belongs in a barebones browser. I argue also that the placement and expression of a "disable styles" switch should be consistent regardless of what extensions are installed. The logical place for this switch is a "None" option in the Use Style menu. Make the menu optional and you lose this consistency.

The W3C also reccommends that all browsers have one. I want to se it in by default, not as an extension.

Taking QA Contact as designated owner of Firebird-Menus. Sorry for bugspam.

This should be WONTFIX as suggested by Asa earlier. Extensions implementing this: http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/#linktoolbar http://extensionroom.mozdev.org/#styleselector Moreover I have yet to see a site in the wild that do not provide users with javascript links to change the pages. e.g. the mozilla 1.0 start page (http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0) and extensionroom (http://extensionroom.mozdev.org) does this. Most users don't need this and those that do can either have style links provided as part of a cross-browser solution or download the extension.

> Moreover I have yet to see a site in the wild that do not provide users with > javascript links to change the pages. Because there's no reliable UI for it. A style switcher really is not something that belongs in the page content. It is also not something that should depend on having a scripting language enabled.

Fixed. Firebird now supports alternate stylesheet selection via an icon in the status bar.

verified with 2003010 W2K build.

Hyatt, will this feature be accessible using the keyboard in some way? Either via keyboard shortcuts or by also adding it to the main menu. Otherwise this feature will not be accessible for users without a mouse.