Re: 'role' should be property

Hi Philip,

On 23/05/07, Philip Taylor (Webmaster) <P.Taylor@rhul.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>
>
> Mark Birbeck wrote:>
>
>  > [T]here is also no reason that some non-presentational
> > properties [of CSS] couldn't be defined.
>
> Isn't the reason simply that CSS = CSS = "Cascading Style Sheets",
> a medium through which to express /style/ (which is inherently
> presentational) ?  You could posit (say) CWS (Cascading whatever
> sheets) that have the same syntax as CSS but which allow aspects
> other than style to be defined, but by conflating dissimilar ideas
> you would weaken both ...

I wouldn't get too hung up on it. Is this about to happen tomorrow? Of
course not--we're just discussing a few ideas that might be useful in
language development over the next few years. (Even so, CSS has
already incorporated features relating to behaviour, which is not
presentational, so the genie is out of the bottle.)

Anyway, my main point is about factoring; in software development it's
not only desirable but crucial to keep taking out common components
and features from code, and putting them into libraries. It's
important not only because of the question of re-use, but more
significantly--in my  view--because it promotes a change in 'mind-set'
amongst developers, and makes it easier for people to keep in their
heads what it is that they are dealing with.

So in the case we're talking about, the most important point I've been
driving at is that we have a processing model in CSS that is
incredibly useful in other situations, and it would be great to make
it available. There is a simple parallel with XSL and XPath; XSL was
split into a number of documents, including one which defined XSLT and
another that specified XPath. XSLT then referred to the XPath document
by reference, but the great thing was that any other spec could now do
the same.

It would be very easy to do the same with CSS, i.e., to create a
document which would define the _how_ of the processing, and then to
reference that in CSS--which can then focus on defining styling rules.
Other languages could then define properties that are set using the
same architecture...such as 'role'. ;)

Regards,

Mark

-- 
  Mark Birbeck, formsPlayer

  mark.birbeck@x-port.net | +44 (0) 20 7689 9232
  http://www.formsPlayer.com | http://internet-apps.blogspot.com

  standards. innovation.

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2007 15:39:36 UTC