Support for defining the visual characteristics of HTML views being rendered. The StyleSheet is used to translate the HTML model into visual characteristics. This enables views to be customized by a look-and-feel, multiple views over the same model can be rendered differently, etc. This can be thought of as a CSS rule repository. The key for CSS attributes is an object of type CSS.Attribute. The type of the value is up to the StyleSheet implementation, but the toString method is required to return a string representation of CSS value.

The primary entry point for HTML View implementations to get their attributes is the getViewAttributes method. This should be implemented to establish the desired policy used to associate attributes with the view. Each HTMLEditorKit (i.e. and therefore each associated JEditorPane) can have its own StyleSheet, but by default one sheet will be shared by all of the HTMLEditorKit instances. HTMLDocument instance can also have a StyleSheet, which holds the document-specific CSS specifications.

In order for Views to store less state and therefore be more lightweight, the StyleSheet can act as a factory for painters that handle some of the rendering tasks. This allows implementations to determine what they want to cache and have the sharing potentially at the level that a selector is common to multiple views. Since the StyleSheet may be used by views over multiple documents and typically the HTML attributes don't effect the selector being used, the potential for sharing is significant.

The rules are stored as named styles, and other information is stored to translate the context of an element to a rule quickly. The following code fragment will display the named styles, and therefore the CSS rules contained.

 
  import java.util.*;
  import javax.swing.text.*;
  import javax.swing.text.html.*;
 
  public class ShowStyles {
 
      public static void main(String[] args) {
        HTMLEditorKit kit = new HTMLEditorKit();
        HTMLDocument doc = (HTMLDocument) kit.createDefaultDocument();
        StyleSheet styles = doc.getStyleSheet();
 
        Enumeration rules = styles.getStyleNames();
        while (rules.hasMoreElements()) {
            String name = (String) rules.nextElement();
            Style rule = styles.getStyle(name);
            System.out.println(rule.toString());
        }
        System.exit(0);
      }
  }
 

The semantics for when a CSS style should override visual attributes defined by an element are not well defined. For example, the html <body bgcolor=red> makes the body have a red background. But if the html file also contains the CSS rule body { background: blue } it becomes less clear as to what color the background of the body should be. The current implementation gives visual attributes defined in the element the highest precedence, that is they are always checked before any styles. Therefore, in the previous example the background would have a red color as the body element defines the background color to be red.

As already mentioned this supports CSS. We don't support the full CSS spec. Refer to the javadoc of the CSS class to see what properties we support. The two major CSS parsing related concepts we do not currently support are pseudo selectors, such as A:link { color: red }, and the important modifier.