- From: Henry S. Thompson <ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
- Date: Tue, 11 Feb 97 09:37:19 GMT
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
Jon Bosak writes: > The problem I'm having with a distinction between behavior and > appearance is that it just won't stay nailed down. Most behavior can > be (and is) described with regard to an appearance, and most > appearances are the result of some behavior. Peter has a system that > uses Java code to perform (among other things) the formatting > functions that in some other system might be expressed in a > stylesheet. Is that behavior or appearance? > > [example deleted] On the one hand, Yes. That is, rendering (creating an appearance for a medium, e.g. 256 colour raster display) is behaviour. It can be specified by appeal to less (LaTeX) or more (DSSSL) or most (Java) procedural means, but processing is always involved or implied. On the other hand No. That is, it is attractive to suppose that rendering behaviour will treat link descriptions in the same way as the rest of the markup in a document, encouraging us to use the same mechanism, namely style specifications, to determine rendering behaviour for link descriptions as we do for the rest of the document. The SGML Way is to use DSSSL for this when you can. It remains to be seen whether this group thinks that XSL (= an XML-targeted DSSSL subset) will do the job, or whether augmentations will be necessary. I for one would NOT be happy if such augmentations took us outside the domain of rendering into e.g. user interactions. In other words, all rendering is processing, but not all processing is rendering, and specifying ALL processing needs a general-purpose programming language. SMF, TNMJ. ht
Received on Tuesday, 11 February 1997 04:37:31 UTC