Re: From CSS to DSSSL

Jon Bosak wrote:
> | DSSSL has been deployed to generate HTML (in Jade -- I have built a
> | whole website this way), and Jade will generate HTML+CSS as soon as CSS
> | is supported in a standard way by major browsers. It is important to
> | remember though, that shipping dumbed-down documents over the web is
> | second best.
> 
> True, but I predict that you will see a lot of XML+CSS (as per-element
> embedded style attributes) being generated from databases.  That's
> what I want to see coming out of docs.sun.com as soon as I can get our
> people to work on the experimental XML output some more.

Why not use a fixed CSS or DSSSL stylesheet rather than embedding that
information into each element?
 
> That's exactly where I ended up on this.  CSS is simple and enables a
> lot of functionality but is inherently incapable of handling the hard
> cases; DSSSL can handle anything but is a bitch to learn.

I think that your experience learning DSSSL is very different from
everyone else's. You were the first, with basically no examples or
tutorials. I learned from your examples and found it very easy going.
Imagine learning SGML from the ISO Spec -- you'd be convinced that it
was a bitch to learn too. But people learn it every day. Presumably you
were also working with quarter-implemented tools, which means that
instead of using some simple DSSSL feature (like ipreced) you must have
uses dozens of lines of code that emulate it. I have not yet seen
anything that is easy to do in CSS that is hard to do in DSSSL except
things that depend on the implied "built-in" HTML stylesheet.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Thursday, 17 April 1997 11:42:03 UTC