Re: Cross-References in GCPM (was: CSS Pages and Pagination)

Yes, counters are a different case, for which there are some solutions
today. But I was specifically addressing the use case where text from a
target is used as the text for a reference. Even if technically feasible I
see it (in general) as a bad idea.

On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 9:18 AM, Johannes Wilm <johanneswilm@vivliostyle.com
> wrote:

>
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2015 at 4:57 PM, Brady Duga <duga@google.com> wrote:
>
>> Looking at this specific use case, why is it better to do this at render
>> time, instead of during content processing/creation? That is, it seems like
>> you have an existing working solution, what problem are you trying to solve
>> by moving this into CSS? I ask because this really seems to cross the
>> styling/content barrier, moving what seems to be entirely content into
>> stylesheets, and doesn't seem much like an edge case (I can't see a
>> plausible argument for this being stylistic). Moving content into styles
>> like this makes other automated processing of the content harder (or at
>> least more expensive). For instance, a search for "figure 1.1" across all
>> the books in my library will now require loading all chapters of all books
>> into a UA, instead of just using an xml or html parser to find the text.
>>
>
>
> If the cross reference includes page numbers, one cannot really know what
> these will be before having laid out the text. This can potentially also
> mean that certain parts need to be rerendered several times. For example:
>
> Say you want on page 90 of a book, with a lot of graphs and figures, you
> want to refer to a graph that is on page 99. First the rendererer lays out
> everything entirely without adding page numbers. It then determined the
> page number of the graph, and adds this to page. The reference text could
> for example be something like "figure 23: 'Linguistic dialects in
> pre-Colombian Mesoamerica', p.99", but when that has been inserted, pages
> 90- have to be redrawn and it turns out that now the figure has been moved
> on to page 100, so the original text is being updated to "figure 23:
> 'Linguistic dialects in pre-Colombian Mesoamerica', p.100", but
> unfortunately that extra digit in the page number means that now it is
> being pushed on to p. 101, etc. .
>
> Eventually the page number will likely stabilize (with exception of
> certain edge cases), but before that it may potentially involve quite a few
> redraws of large parts of the content, and I wonder if the browser vendors
> would be interested in putting this into their engines or whether they see
> it as a pure book/scientific journal feature that they don't feel they
> need/want to support.
>
> It may still make sense to describe this in terms of CSS, but then have
> JavaScript interpret that CSS to do the actual layouting of that part. I
> say "may", because it may also be overstretching the purpose of CSS. For
> citations on the web, for example, the main project I am aware is the CSL
> (Citation Style Language)[1], which is based on rather than CSS. It would
> probably make sense to have a field test trying the CSS-approach based on a
> JavaScript polyfill before committing to any CSS or XML-based spec on this.
>
> [1] http://citationstyles.org/
>
>