RE: Decouple XBL2 From CSS

On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Doug Schepers wrote:
> > 
> > XBL2 is intended to be a language used on the Web, primarily in Web 
> > browsers. The Web is based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so XBL should 
> > work tightly with those languages. XSL:FO is never used on the Web, so 
> > seems mostly irrelevant in terms of XBL.
> 
> I do not agree with your personal definition of "the Web" and will not 
> accept this as a technical response.  Your definition of the term is 
> tautological.

XBL2 is being developed for and by Web browser vendors. Web browsers use 
CSS as their styling language. Deep integration with CSS is needed for XBL 
to be useful to Web browser vendors.

In the past five or so years that I've been working on the XBL spec, there 
have been several attempts at making XBL2 more "generic". Every single 
attempt has resulted in a worse specification, less suitable for the 
primary purpose that I am concerned with. Thus at this point I am not 
going to risk that again -- XBL2 is aimed at the HTML+CSS+JS market (what 
I would term "The Web", based on the way that some huge percentage of what 
Google crawls over the Internet in fact falls into the HTML+CSS+JS 
category). It must be suitable for that market, it must integrate with the 
technologies used in that market.

If you could provide use cases for which the use of a styling language 
other than CSS would be important, then please do -- if it's possible to 
support other cases without making the common case worse, then by all 
means it's something we should do.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 3 August 2006 17:06:31 UTC