Re: Status of XSL and CSS?

At 07:56 PM 4/6/99 -0500, Bill Wadley wrote:
>I'm wondering what the current thinking is regarding XSL and CSS. I've read
>some archived messages by Paul Prescod and Simon St.Laurent
>(http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/1999Feb/), but can't tell in
>which direction the SVG-WG is looking.
>
>However, CSS (at least CSS1) was created before XML (and therefore slightly
>kludgy when it comes to XML?), while XSL was designed for XML and is more
>powerful. Why is there a debate? Isn't using XSL self-evident? (Obviously
>not, but I'm wondering why :)

The main issue I'd bring up is that XSL is about transforming your
documents into a set of formatting objects, while CSS is just about
annotating elements.  For a vocabulary like SVG, which will have its own
perspective on how information should look, the annotation approach seems
most sensible.  XSL's formatting objects seem designed for the needs of
page layout, not vector graphics creation.  (In my humble opinion, anyway.)

What Paul and I were thrashing out wasn't so much whether CSS or XSL should
be used in SVG, but how CSS style annotation should be done in standards
like SVG.  Paul wanted it all broken out to separate attributes, while I
was happy to let CSS be CSS and use a single style attribute containing CSS
name-value pairs.

Simon St.Laurent
XML: A Primer
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http://www.simonstl.com

Received on Tuesday, 6 April 1999 22:24:18 UTC