Stylesheet association

There's been a fair bit of talk on xml-dev about how to associate a
stylesheet with a document (James Clark and Terry Allen, at least,
have been involved).  It occurs to me that this is pretty simple with
one addition to the linking spec.

Right now, there are no predefined values for the role attribute of a
locator.  If the predefined value "xml-style" or "xml-stylesheet" is
allowed, this indicates that the destination is a stylesheet.  An
xlink can be used to associate multiple possible stylesheets with a
document.  This method allows an XLG to associate stylesheets with
read-only documents.

In the simplest model, the root element of the document would be
linked to one or more stylesheets.  For more flexibility, other
elements could also be linked; if this happened, the user agent could
switch to the specified stylesheet for that element.  I'm leery of
that behavior, though, because it should either be required or
forbidden, and requiring it seems too complex for now.  Maybe in 2.0.

-Chris

P.S.  I've seen good mentions of XML on the 'net from people totally
uninvolved with the WG or even with xml-dev.  On the Lynx Developers'
list, someone said:

<quote>
I am just starting to find serious articles discussion the next
generation markup language, XML, around in various public journals.  I
was wondering if anyone on this mailing list has begun thinking about
the potential impacts this may have on lynx.
</quote>

And on the HTML Working Group of the W3C, someone said:

<quote>
I think you're after XML and proper SGML on the web.  Join the queue!
</quote>
-- 
Christopher R. Maden                  One Richmond Square
DynaText SIT Technical Support        Providence, RI 02906 USA
Inso Corporation                      +1.401.421.9550 (voice)
Electronic Publishing Solutions       +1.401.521.2030 (facsimile)

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 1997 10:55:08 UTC