Re: The concept of cascading

Paul Prescod 
> I don't understand the benefit of cascading over parameterization.
With
> parameterization the person in the central design office says exactly
> what can be changed and the departments supply "stubs" that do the
> changing. With the cascade, they can change whatever they feel like.

I don't find the idea of a central authority laying down styling rules
and then demanding "stubs" from hapless department managers appealing
or efficient. And I don't see stylistic anarchy as a side effect of
CSS. In a benevolent organization, departments would have a say in the
graphical personalization of their documents and stylistic compliance
would be by mutual consent. In a fascist bureaucracy, compliance could
be assured by fear of termination or denial of tenure. In either case,
the stylesheet is not directly accessible to everyone in the
organization. Documents authored within a department could have the
departmental stylesheet linked secondary to the organization's main
stylesheet, or the main stylesheet could be an '@import' in the
departmental.

Department-specific headers with logo or other images could be in a
server-side include.

Seems simpler to manage and no less controllable than parameter-passing
to activate a program stub.
 
David Perrell

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 1997 12:36:42 UTC