Re: From CSS to DSSSL

Alan Karben wrote:
> I've always thought that DSSSL needed a 'standard' baby language, which
> would essentially give non-programmers an authoring tool (notepad) until
> better tools come on the market. Maybe CSS could be that language; then a
> lot of questions would be answered, as long as someone volunteered to write
> a CSS-to-DSSSL style sheet converter and promised to keep it current.

I think a simple declarative subset of DSSSL is a great idea, but I
don't understand why you would use CSS to do it. CSS is totally bound to
HTML. There is no way to specify a link, a table or an image. You can
just as easily replicate the CSS "flow objects" in DSSSL (by my count,
there is one missing) as extend CSS to support the new flow objects it
would need (it is missing probably at least a dozen, just to replicate
the stylistic features of HTML 3.2 in any other DTD). Given the same set
of characteristics and flow objects the only difference between DSSSL
and CSS is a) notation (Lisp vs. C) and b) scalability (how do you move
past the declarative subset).

 Paul Prescod

Received on Saturday, 19 April 1997 05:13:33 UTC