In HTML 3.2, rather little provision had been as yet made for support of style sheets.
In particular, the CLASS, ID, and STYLE
attributes so needed to allow for a variety of styles throughout the document had
not as yet been provided. Even the <STYLE> element was only
a mere placeholder, with no idea as to what sort of information was to go inside
it, and not even any specific plan as to what stylesheet language would be used (or
else an assumption that only text/css or suchlike would ever be
permitted?), so that the TYPE attribute which HTML 4.0 and 4.01 would
require is here not even permitted. One solution provided at that time to specify
the manner of style sheets used was to use the <META> element to
call out the type of style sheets. So, for example in this file we have:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Style-Type" CONTENT="text/css">
In such a simplistic setting however, it is enough to use the element (only in
the <HEAD> of the document) to set apart a region for simple
style commands, and since <UL> and <MENU> are
normally considered so equivalent, having here the two different elements, with
different names, therefore allows for them to be made different looking in the
document, using only the stylesheet commands that are confined to the
<STYLE> section in the <HEAD>.
In this file, the <HEAD> section contains the following:
<STYLE>
MENU {
line-height: 1.6;
font-size: larger;
text-align: center;
list-style-type: none;
}
</STYLE>
So let's see how <MENU> looks with this stylesheet command:
And here, for comparison, is the same using <UL>:
This file was written in HTML 3.2.
Next Level Up