Re: CSS vs. DSSSL-O

At 12:02 27/11/96 -0800, Joe English wrote:

>I think we should also consider using architectural
>forms for specifying presentation for XML documents.
>A simple "XML online display architecture" -- most
>likely based on HTML -- would be sufficient for many
>user applications, and would probably be significantly
>easier than either DSSSL or CSS.

I'm afraid we tried this back in 1991 when we developed British Standard
7402: Guide to specifying electronic typographic markup (though in those
days we didn't know of the term 'architectural forms'"). While it works for
simple monolingual documents based on a single writing direction it does not
provide a mechanism that will work across the whole range of ISO 10646
characters, or that provides a general purpose solution to specifying
typography. If our goal is to supply a universal mechanism then we are going
to have to deal with DSSSL at some time and, as the CSS guys found out last
week, accept that a greater degree of sophistication is needed to cope with
handling text presentation/
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/

Received on Thursday, 28 November 1996 08:01:32 UTC