- From: Biep Durieux <bdurieux@baan.com>
- Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 03:54:50 -0500 (EST)
- To: "'www-style@w3.org'" <www-style@w3.org>
Jeffrey Yasskin (mailto:jyasskin@hotmail.com) wrote: >I agree that CSS having its own selection language completely separate >from XPath and XQuery is not a great idea. However, I don't think that >intruducing regular expressions will help. Regular expressions will limit >the development of CSS stylesheets to developers familiar with or willing >to learn regular expressions. I fully agree. I didn't intend to propose a string regexp language; I simply chose that in my examples to avoid having to introduce a hierarchical regexp language. That's why in http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2001Feb/0000.html I wrote: >>Please don't look at the specifics of the examples given here. I simply >>took the JavaScript regexp language and extended it with an exclamation >>point to match the current element, and with tag brackets to match >>elements. >>This does not do justice to the hierarchical nature of XML elements. Actually, I think that my second example would already be a lot more acceptable to you, as it basically copies the structure of the XML it is talking about. But yes, incorporating an appropriate existing language would of course be ideal. My main objection is that the current standardisation efforts seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to wishes: adding lexical items. That makes the language huge, obscure, and weak. (Weak in the sense that the language will only be able to do what the designers had in mind - If I want every fifth list element to be red, I am out of luck, that kind of thing.) With the addition of a bit of grammar, a much smaller addition to the language could enrich in much more, and in a more systematic way. For basically the same objection to another aspect of the language, see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/2001Jan/0073.html. J. A. Durieux mailto:BDurieux@baan.com http://www.biep.org
Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2001 07:34:46 UTC