Re: Rendering order without positioning

> Otherwise someone is going to create new, better, _alternate_ specs and that 
> will spell the end to CSS and possibly HTML.

Only to the extent that they have already drifted too far out of their 
niche.

If a new competing technology proves better, for a class of application,
it is likely that it is better matched to the application.  If the
established technology tries to encroach into that area, it will
compromise its ability to do what it was intended to do and, if the
new technology succeeds (and just being new can be sufficient - I would
argue that HTML/CSS was often used instead of PDF because it was more
fashionable) the older technology will be too complex to fulfill its
original role and will have to be replaced in that role as well.

For what most "designers" want to do with internet accessed documents
(aka "web sites") falls either into the category of taking a content
stream and a layout description stream and merging them, which seems to
me to be the XLST niche, or into the category of taking a formatted
page image and annotating it with structure, which is the tagged PDF
niche.  (Many would probably prefer to leave out the step of annotating
with structure.)

Received on Wednesday, 26 May 2004 02:15:53 UTC