Re: DSSSL style editing (was: RE: Positioning...)

[Bert Bos:]

| > Perhaps so, but "a large percentage of the pages posted by
| > individuals" is not "a large percentage of the pages posted".  I think
| > that HTML and CSS do just fine for individuals.  That's not the
| > problem space that I personally am interested in.  I'm interested in
| > the problems relating to large-scale commercial publishing and data
| > distribution efforts.  XML+DSSSL may or may not be useful to
| > individuals; that's up to other people to decide.  But the level of
| > functionality they offer is essential to solving the kind of
| > large-scale problems that I'm interested in.
| 
| Maybe, but I doubt that the needs of commercial publishing are so
| different from those of non-commercial institutions and of individuals.
| The only difference is that the former may have the money to reach their
| goals through a brute force approach.

And that failure to recognize the difference is what has led to the
creation of a style language that will not meet the needs of the
commercial publisher.

Let's just take one, simple, obvious, everyday example.  I have an
illustration that's the fourth figure in the third chapter of a book.
It should be labeled "Figure 3-4".  I change my mind and move it
farther down in the chapter; now it should be labeled "Figure 3-7".  I
change my mind again and make the chapter an appendix; now the figure
should be labeled "Figure C-7".  Show me the CSS stylesheet that makes
this happen.

This is a real commercial publishing problem that I have had to solve
on a number of occasions in real stylesheets for real publications.
It is not a text manipulation problem, it is a stylesheet problem, and
a very common one.  I have put this example to you at least twice in
the past year and you have chosen to ignore it.  That's your
privilege, but please don't claim that such problems do not exist or
that they don't need to be solved for commercial publishing.

Jon

Received on Thursday, 6 February 1997 20:02:05 UTC