Re: XHTML 2.0 considered harmful

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 09:07:33PM +0000, Tim Bagot wrote:
> At 2003-01-15T14:03-0500, Peter Foti (PeterF) wrote:-
> > Company ABC is concerned that the data must be presented the way that they
> > intended it to be, but they don't have access to the <head> of Company XYZ's
> > web page.  So how then does Company XYZ no how to "style" the data it is
> > given?
> 
> Since ABC and XYZ are apparently cooperating here, XYZ can presumably put
> ABC's style rules into their own style sheet, adding a .ABC or whatever to
> the selectors. Or they could just put the article in a separate document,
> referencing ABC's style sheet, and embed it using object.

A related example that doesn't propose cooperation might be a web
search engine displaying output.

Another could be generating XHTML on the fly with CSS styles, using XSLT.

In theory, XSLT has the power to put the information anywhere you
please and generate new ids or classes as needed, in practice
it's probably easier to keep the generated additions to content/style
nearby in the document tree.

Or consider trying to generate XHTML + CSS from a SAX parser
taking some custom XML dialect as input. (You could use XSLT
but sometimes a more lightweight tool makes sense.)

I see the style attribute as being useful in much the same way
that anonymous functions are useful in programming.

-- 
    Albert Lunde          Albert-Lunde@northwestern.edu (new address)
                          Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu (old address)

Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 01:07:47 UTC